In the Opening Explorer Help Page there is a section that reads <When I add up the number of games in the moves column, it's bigger than the total number of games that contain the position shown. How can that be?> and a little example where From's gambit overlaps with the King's gambit.

Unfortunately the answer given is not 100% clear and doesn't cover every case of transposition, but it gives a thumbnail view.

If his schedule permits, is there any chance we can have <Nigel Short> on live commentary for the World Championship Match?

Could we make him an offer he can't refuse?

Thanks to Nigel's past efforts as guest expert, <CG.com> remains the only chess website in history to host an analyst who refers to the Black pieces as "The Brothers" and the White pieces as "The Honkies."

You can't really put a price on that eh?

In 2012, more than ever before, people will be watching the match on their and pads and kindles etc. While our live page actually works fairly well on most mobile devices, it might be more useful to some people if a simplified version appeared instead. (Of course, mobile users will always be able to turn off the simplified view if they need to.)

Regarding Sicilian Distinctions - telling apart the Kan from the Taimanov

The reason I bring this pedantic point up is I am doing a Sicilian Taimanov Youtube playlist ( http://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... ), and noticed actually that the following Fischer Spassky game is listed as a Sicilian Paulsen (Kan):

Spassky vs Fischer, 1972

According to Wiki, when Nc6 is played, it transposes from the Paulsen (Kan) into the Taimanov variation. To keep the Kan being a Kan, black plays 5..Qc7

Am I correct in thinking that this Fischer Spassky game should be Sicilian Taimanov ?!

I think to get a correct opening classification it is important to go from the very last move of the game backwards and match the positions against an Opening reference. If this method is used then 5... Nc6 going in reverse would get the correct Sicilian Taimanov identification.

It is funny though because B46 has been assigned to this game which is Sicilian Taimanov:

Sicilian, Taimanov Variation (B46)

In fact also this Fischer Spassky page has Sicilian Taimanov for game 21 on the overview:

Fischer-Spassky World Championship Match (1972)

but on the game header it has:

I am hardly an expert on what constitutes a Taimanov Sicilian so I don't feel qualified to exactly say what is correct or incorrect, but I can tell you what our files say. If our data are to be believed, it seems that the Taimanov is in fact a subset of the Paulsen Sicilian. (Historically this makes sense, as Paulsen lived a century prior to Taimanov.)

In fact one of our FEN positions in the master file says that this position, after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nc6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Be2 Nge7

click for larger view

is <Sicilian Defense: Paulsen Variation. Taimanov Variation>. It is labelled B46.

Perhaps a contradiction, is that this position after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nc6 5.Nc3 a6 (also a B46)

click for larger view

is dubbed simply <Sicilian Defense: Paulsen Variation.> I would think that it's the ...a6 that makes it a Taimanov, but it seems that Dr. Schiller believes that the ...Nge7 is part of what makes a Taimanov distinct. Or if it's an error, we will fix it and inform Dr. Schiller.

In short, perhaps we need to add a new FEN to cover this transposition, or perhaps we just need to relabel that Paulsen Variation above to read "Paulsen Variation: Taimanov Variation" just like the other one.

The Taimanov Variation was introduced by the opening moves

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nc6 (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 e6)

Sicilian Defense: Paulsen/Taimanov Variations

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4

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Paulsen 4...a6

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Taimanov 4...Nc6

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There seems to be a problem with 14th Dubai Open (2012).

Ni Hua won this with 7/9 on tiebreak, yet his final score on the leaderboard at the above page is 6.5/9. Similarly there were 5 players who finished on 7/9 according to http://www.chess-results.com/tnr708..., yet only two appear on the tournament page as having 7/9...

With Ni Hua, he won his first four games, drew the next four and then won Ni Hua vs Y Kuzubov, 2012 in the 9th round to secure first, but at the game page it's given as a draw when the final position is clearly won. There is obviously a problem with quite a few of the other games as well.

Sorry about that, but it's better that you know.

<from recent newsletter 'special WCC bulletin'>

What's better than a Woman Grandmaster?

That's right... TWO Woman Grandmasters!

For the upcoming Anand-Gelfand World Chess Championship, we'll be broadcasting the games live, joined by our very special guest, WGM Natalia Pogonina. She'll be joined by WGM Jennifer Shahade during game #3 and then again for the exciting final rounds (#10-12).

Make no mistake, our commentators are more than pretty faces! Natalia is a three-time European Girls champion (U16, twice U18), and has taken first place at multiple prestigious international tournaments. In 2010, her rating broke the 2500 mark. Jennifer is a two-time US Women's Champion, three-time Olympian, and noted chess author, not to mention an accomplished poker player. They'll both offer top-notch analysis and insights into the positions as the games develop, while they interact directly with Chessgames members.

I'm sure that there's a reason but for the life of me I can't imagine what that reason could be. I was a software developer and software manager for 40 years and I used to tell my subordinates that I always did things for a reason. It might be a dumb or misguided reason but I always had a reason. Of course, I'm not saying that's the case here. ;-)

What I would really like to see is a way to generate tables. Tables often provide the most concise way of presenting information such as a matrix of candidate moves and multiple chess engine evaluations of each move. See for example Akobian vs The World, 2011. "All" it would take would be a way to insert tabs and not have them be replaced by spaces so that all the text and numbers would line up in columns. Of course, that would mean that we would also need a <simple> way to specify the tab stops and change them if necessary.

An alternate approach would be to have a way to specify that a block of text should be rendered in a non-proportional font. That way we could simply add the necessary spaces to make the columns line up. It's not elegant but since, once displayed, the post is not going to change, it would be adequate.

From Nov 28, 2007

MostlyAverageJoe: <CG> Now I am curious why 54 characters are the cut-off before hyphen-space insertion happens?

MAJ, used to 80-character wide windows.

chessgames.com: <MAJ> It breaks the formatting of the HTML for some people, who have their character size set very large.

chessgames.com chessforum

From Dec 30, 2009

chessgames.com: <zarg: Sometimes when posting e.g. tables of data, I would like to keep spaces i.e. avoid <cg> from replacing multiple spaces with a single one ... and use a font like e.g. <new courier>which preserve column alignment of the displayed text. Also turn off special display rules when and <> is used would be nice...>

We understand that issue. We've tried to present tabular data ourselves and know what it feels like trying to fight against the weirdformatting rules that we don't even fully understand.

<Is there a way to achieve this, for example by enclosing the posted text in some special tags>

Sadly, no. We've experimented in the past with ways to do this, in fact somewhere in this chessforum there was a special post I made which attempted to break into fixed-width bare bones layout. It looked great on my monitor but failed on several others, some users thought "Wow, they fixed it!" while others saw a garbled mess of characters. That's basically the reason why we don't go in this direction: compatibility.

In short, we have a very flexible kibitzing system, but flexible is NOT what you want when you wish to display tabular data. It's so flexible in fact that anything but the most trivial table would be guaranteed to not display properly on many people's machines. We haven't given up on the notion of table-display entirely (the need for it continually crops up) -- but on the other hand we're not working on the kibitzing module at this time.

We're trying to reconcile why we have the classical game Vishy-Gelfand record as 7-5 (see search "Anand vs Gelfand") where Chessbase reckons it to be 6-5. (see http://www.chessbase.com/news/2012/...).

The difference seems to be that we regard Anand vs Gelfand, 2000 from the 2000 FIDE World Cup KO as a classical game. Are we certain that this wasn't one of the rapid tiebreaks?