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?

<The 1st FIDE World Cup takes place in Shenyang, China 1st-13th September 2000. The knockout event has reached the final which starts tomorrow. The favourite Viswanathan Anand will play Evgeny Bareev in a two game match followed by playoffs. Anand's progress to the semi-finals was relatively comfortable with easy qualification from the group stages and an easier than expected win against Vassily Ivanchuk. In the semi-finals he faced a tough test from Boris Gelfand which was only settled in a <sudden death speed game.>>

So it would have been draw-draw-speed tiebreak.

Anand and Gelfand had two draws in the regular match and then Anand won the tiebreak 2.5-1.5, at faster time controls. I have not seen a source for how fast these were.

Some of those kibitzers -- blingice, TheSlid, Hesam7 -- go back a very long way. Some are even still with us.

My 9th and 24th moves ... were also chosen as best by Fritz 13 ... after over an hour.

Every GTM players learns that sooner or later they are victims to the caprice of Toga. However remember you always get 3 points if you guess the move that was actually played. Understand that GTM is not a 100% skill based game, even though it aspires to be. Hence the name, GUESS the Move.

What we can do is recompute that specific GTM game, perhaps giving it a minute a half-move, and hopefully it will improve its move list. Unfortunately at this time we can't spend a minute a half-move all the time; we simply lack the resources. If you'd like to email me the details of which moves you think were unfairly judged I'd be willing to look at it.