Portal:Chess/Did you know

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• ...that the term Alekhine's gun, ascribed to a chess tactic in which a player aligns, on a single file, his two rooks and, at the rear, his queen, was first used to describe a formation employed by the eponymous Russian world champion against Danish chess master Aron Nimzowitsch in a 1930 interzonal tournament, the application of which led to Nimzowitsch's resigning within four moves?
• ...that Jonathan Mestel, an applied mathematician, thrice the British national champion, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs world champion in the division of players aged fewer than 16 years, and a FIDE Grandmaster, won the 1997 World Chess Solving Championship and became the first player to be styled both an over-the-board and a problem solving Grandmaster?
• ...that, having moved from his native Germany to South Africa prior to the outbreak of World War Two, International Master Wolfgang Heidenfeld won the South African national championship eight times, first in 1939, and represented the nation at the 1958 Chess Olympiad contested in Munich, Germany, and subsequently moved to the Republic of Ireland, the national championship of which he claimed six times between 1958 and 1972 and which he represented at four Olympiads and one iteration of the European Team Championship?
• ...that Sun Tzu chess is a hybrid variant in which each player's back rank pieces are positioned randomly, with, à la transcendental chess and as against Chess960, no forced player-player symmetry and no positional requirements (save that each player must have a white-squared and a black-squared bishop; in which, as in dark chess, a fog of war of imperfect information is imposed, such that a player may see only squares occupied by his own pieces or those squares to which any piece might, in one turn, move; and in which, as in crazyhouse, a player, having captured a piece, may, on any subsequent turn, place that piece as his own, with few restrictions and with the provision that a player may see all available squares on which he might place a given piece, the dark chess regulations notwithstanding?

• ...that, of the twenty-three iterations of the United States Women's Chess Championship contested between 1938 and 1971, in only six did neither Woman International Master (WIM) Gisela Kahn Gresser nor WIM Mona May Karff finish in at least equal first, and that each woman, Gresser in 1969 and Karff in 1974, won her final title aged at least sixty years?
• ...that Hydra, a chess-playing computer principally programmed by German Christian Donninger, has, notably having scored five-and-one-half points over six games against English Grandmaster Michael Adams, then the world's seventh-ranked player, and having scored three points over four games against former Fédération Internationale des Échecs world champion Grandmasters Russian Alexander Khalifman (1999), pictured, Ukrainian Ruslan Ponomariov (2002) and Uzbek Rustam Kasimdzhanov (2004), never lost over-the-board to an unaided human player but did lose a two-game correspondence chess match to German Grandmaster Arno Nickel and in its current form achieved only a draw against Nickel?

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