<regarding Mikhail Tal Joe Gallagher's book 'The Magic Of Mikhail Tal' has on page 204 the following "Shortly afterwards, on 28 June 1992, Mikhail Tal died in a Moscow hospital. All his organs had stopped functioning". ...

I'm not saying that the 27th of June 1992 isn't the correct date but I was wondering where the information in the correction slip comes from?>

Thanks for your excellent research.

About "where the information comes from", it was an anonymous correction slip that offered no sources. My guess is that it came from one specific lunatic who has been harassing us for years. His obsessions are numerous, and among them are researching the dates that various grandmasters passed away. We banned him from posting years ago but we still receive emails from him by the score, accusing Chessgames of stealing all of his ideas, accusing us of being anti-Semites, claiming to be the world correspondence chess champion, and other grand delusions.

I use the word "lunatic" here not as an insult but with great sympathy. Sometimes trolls will pretend to be crazy in order to disrupt the discussion, but this individual is not putting on an act. He is genuinely in need of psychiatric care.

That is really very sad.

< The old timers around here know exactly who I'm talking about.>

It (open) St. Petersburg 300 (2003)

Our guess is that back in 2003 the official site was producing nonstandard PGN and we were inserting the data without much examination. Back then we were not particularly on the guard for that sort of thing. The games include Vitiugov, Miroshnichenko, Najer, Areshchenko, Riazantsev, Lastin, and other big names. We'd really hate to delete 479 game over a technical squabble, but I don't see much alternative. It's critically import to us that our PGN is in exactly one standard style.

Right now, we're going over these games and salvaging the ones that are in game collections or have kibitzing and deleting the rest. I'm not sure how many have been discussed but it's not a terribly large number.

I suppose we considered it, but we have always felt strongly that such information should be treated confidentially.

If you've been reading recent chess news you'd see that Kasparov recently said that Karpov would be the FIDE president today if member nations were allowed to cast their votes in secret. Kasparov has the discretion to not come right out and say it, but in my opinion he was clearly implying that Ilyumzhinov used bribery and/or coercion to ensure his reelection. Once you put a little curtain on the voting booth, such concerns go away.

Now I don't think there is any bribery or bullying going on in the Chessgames Challenge, but the principle still applies. To lose your confidentially means that you may not vote for what you think is best, because of fear that you'll be later held accountable for your decision. Perhaps somebody wants to vote for an inferior move "just to keep the debate on the table", but under your system they may be shamed into voting for the crowd favorite.

Absolutely, no argument there.

I'm not sure I'm actually advocating an open system like that myself - just thinking about it. It <would> have benefits, as well as the drawbacks you mention.

I think it may actually lead to <more> responsible voting, although a side effect of that could be a significant drop in vote count, as more people will refrain from voting if/when they are not sure of the best move - but would that be a bad thing? That's not a rhetorical question, btw, I'm really not sure. :)

Those who vote for "minority candidates" to keep them on the table, generally vote early on, and many of them will return later to throw their support behind one of the candidates with realistic chances once it's clear that their early choice didn't take off - so a voter list that shows only the final votes wouldn't be an issue to them.

However, there's no doubt that the open system can introduce extra pressures, which could range in negativity between flame wars and "persecutions" to "merely" making the game less fun for many participants, so your wariness about that is more than understandable.

He is probably getting care as we speak. I always suspected he was institutionalized; when he was good, he got an hour of computer time to swamp us with posts, and when he was bad, the nurse took him back to his cell.

Oof, it hurts my head already.:)

<cg.com> yet another Challenge-related suggestion - just a little one this time... ;)