GRENKELEASING Match: Anand vs Grischuk

Grenke Leasing match Anand-Grischuk: Grischuk fights back, but fails to win.

Vishy Anand extended the lead in his match against Sascha Grischuk. Anand added another 1,5 point to his score and is now leading 3,5-0,5. The match is deciced, although the Indian does not want to celebrate too early: “It is a great cushion, but it is better not to think about that”. In the first game of the day Anand blundered but found some resources to escape, and in the second game he was completely lost, but Grischuk had not enough time to find the winning combination. Anand: “He conducted the attack quite well and I had an unpleasant position, despite the extra pawn. You can say, that Alexander just played better than me today.” Grischuk was still in shock at the press conference: “The press will write that Vishy was lucky, but that is bullshit. I don´t deserve any better with the level of my play”.

Finet Chess960 World Championship match Almasi-Svidler: Happy but not satisfied.

“I am much happier than yesterday, but I am not completely satisfied. In the first game I probably had a winning position, but Peter defended very well. In the second game I invested a lot of time, but decided to take the draw by repeating the moves, ” Almasi said at the press conference. Peter Svidler agreed that Almasi had the better positions today. His remark about the openings in Chess960 was remarkable: “You know, I think that I am quite a reasonable player, but I can not play the openings in Chess960. I had problems in my matches against Leko and Aronian, and in this match I still have the same problems. However, when I finished the second game of the day, a friend of mine said that I had just played a perfect Chess960 opening. I don´t know if that is right, but the games were much clearer than yesterday.” After these two draws, Svidler maintains the lead: 2,5-1,5

FiNet Match: Svidler leads 2,5 - 1,5

FiNet Chess960 Open: It´s Aronian again!

Levon Aronian won the FiNet Chess960 Open for he second time. This year he scored an amazing 10 points out of 11 games! “I particularly liked the game against Bacrot, because I had a winning position after only four moves! In the game against Graf I had a difficult position, but in the end I outplayed him. I really like to play Chess960. It is not important to play good moves, you must have a good plan”. Next year the 22-year old Armenian can look forward to play a match against the winner of the Svidler-Almasi match. Ivan Sokolov from The Netherlands and Klaus Bischoff from Germany scored 9 points and shared 2/3 place. Four players scored 8,5 points: Alexei Shirov, Etienne Bacrot, Alexey Dreev and Zigurds Lanka.

Best female player: Antoaneta Stefanova

The best female player was world champion Antoaneta Stefanova. She scored 7,5 points, Alexandra Kosteniuk and Elisabeth Pähtz also played a good tournament and gathered 7 points. Kosteniuk´s husband and manager, Diego Garces said that Alexandra loves Chess960. “We plan to put an Chess960 viewer on our website www.kosteniuk.com soon. My wife spends hours and hours preparing openings, which is the main part of her preparation. If she plays Chess960, she can concentrate on other things.”

The Spike-Team: Volker Böhm and Ralf Schäfer

Livingston Computer Chess960 World Championship: Vampire Spike shows his teeth.

The German program Spike by Volker Böhm and Ralf Schäfer won the first Livingston Chess960 World Computer Chess Championship. After the first day the local heroes from Mainz and Wiesbaden scored four points, and today they could add another 1,5 points which was enough to win the first price. Another German program, Jonny, programmed by the strong chessplayer Johannes Zwanzger landed on the second place, also with 5,5 points, but Spike had better Buchholz points and grabbed the trophy. The Norwegian program Glaurung by Tord Romsted came in third.

The Spike programmers Volker Böhm and Ralf Schäfer started developing their chess program about 2,5 years ago. Both friends are 38 years, went to school and studied together in Kaiserslautern. Both authors like a TV series called „Buffy the vampire slayer“. One character of this series is Spike, a very cool vampire. “We like to build a chess engine that plays a rather agressiv style „spiking“ other engines. We discussed longer about its name than developing it!”, Ralf Schäfer laughed. (more info can be found on www.allaboutspike.com). “We could make much progress because we share the work: I do the search, and Ralf does the evaluation”,Volker Böhm said, and continues: “This Spike version 1.0 will probably be ready in a few weeks. Our older engine version 0.9 can be downloaded from our website http://spike.lazypics.de”.

Let´s not forget Jonny. Johannes Zwanzger spend about a month preparing his engine for this tourney and the “normal” world championship in Reykjavik, which will start on Sunday. “My engine played some very good games and only lost one game, against Shredder. I am so happy with the result, I never expected it. I want to say that the event was extremely well organised, I had a lot of fun and will most definitely come back next year”.

Matches GRENKELEASING Match: Anand-Grischuk 2nd day

Matches Chess960 FiNet Match: Swidler-Almasi 2nd day
For chess960-matches you need a special chess960-viewer
Downloads for Chess960