Arno Nickel

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Arno Nickel (b. February 15, 1952) is a German correspondence chess Grandmaster. In a correspondence match lasting many months, he won two games and drew a third against Hydra, the most powerful chess supercomputer in the world at that time (2005). Nickel, who achieved his grandmaster title in the era before GM-level chess computers, was allowed to use weaker personal computer chess engines to help him decide on his moves in this match. Hydra also received limited assistance from human chess experts and programmers, especially in choosing its opening book moves.

The Hydra supercomputer has subsequently been upgraded and made more powerful. Arno Nickel has also advanced his correspondence and freestyle chess knowledge.

Arno Nickel currently (2006) lives in Berlin and writes and publishes chess books through his well-known Edition Marco. Since 1983 he has been editing the German "Schach-Kalender", a pocket-calendar with about 500 biographical player entries each year and a lot of information, stories, anecdotes, statistics, pictures and other things each year. From 1991 until 1994 he edited the "Schach-Journal" together with Alexander Koblencs, former trainer of Mikhail Tal. In 1996 he published Robert Huebner's famous book "Twenty-five Annotated Games".

Since 2005 Nickel has been promoting Freestyle Chess, a new kind of online chess competition with computer-assisted play, where anything is allowed, also help from other players. He is a co-organizer of the series of PAL/CSS Freestyle Tournaments in 2006, where teams of classic chess masters and grandmasters compete against correspondence chess and computer chess specialists as well as amateurs armed with computer chess engines. An unassisted human or unassisted computer playing alone has never won one of these events; the top prizes have always gone to human/computer teams (often with multiple humans and multiple computers on each team).

Arno Nickel is participant in the current Final of the 21st Correspondence World Championship with the titleholder Joop van Oosterom and other strong players, which started in August 2005 and will probably last until the end of 2007. In March 2007 Nickel beat ICCF-World Champion Joop van Oosterom in their correspondence game from 21th WC Final. Nevertheless van Oosterom won the Final and achieved for a second time to become World Champion.

On August 28, 2006 Arno Nickel began to play an online correspondence chess game against the combined efforts of the users of ChessGames.com. Nickel resigned this game on January 11, 2007 after White's 41st move. [1].