Portal:Chess/Did you know archive
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[edit] July 15, 2007 to July 31, 2007
- ...that an allumwandlung is a form of chess problem of which the full solution involves, as, the promotion of a pawn or pawns to a knight, bishop, rook, and queen?
- ...that neither Ukraine, which won the open division, nor China, which won the women's division, medalled in the overall title calculation at the 36th Chess Olympiad after the former's women's team and the latter's open team finished 18th and 24th respectively?
- ...that the Sokolsky Opening, an irregular opening in which white advances his queen's knight's pawn two squares on his first move (1. b4) is sometimes known as the Orangutan Opening because it was the opening move "suggested" by an orangutan to Polish Grandmaster Savielly Tartakower (pictured) during the latter's 1924 visit to the Bronx Zoo?
- ...that Georgian Grandmaster and thirteen-year women's world champion Maia Chiburdanidze has been commemorated on multiple postage stamps, including one issued by Mongolia in 1986 to depict a position from her 1984 world championship match with Russian Woman Grandmaster Irina Levitina?
- ...that the 1874 varsity match between the Oxford University Chess Club, the oldest university chess club in the United Kingdom, and the club of the University of Cambridge was attended by many prominent London chess masters, including future world chess champion Austrian Wilhelm Steinitz, who served as arbiter?
- ...that, after he was discovered to have used the HIARCS computer chess engine, accessed via a Bluetooth-enabled device situated in his cap, to aid his play at the 2006 Subroto Mukerjee Memorial, Indian Umakant Sharma was banned from competitive chess for ten years by the All India Chess Federation in what is the longest suspension recorded to have been leveled for cheating in chess?
[edit] May 28, 2007 to June 10, 2007; June 20, 2007 to June 24, 2007; September 1, 2007 to September 30, 2007
- ...that Russian team competing in the open division at the 37th Chess Olympiad in 2006 comprised six of the event's top seventeen players by rating and entered the event seeded first but ultimately failed to medal?
- ...that the chess problem Excelsior, published by American puzzle author Sam Loyd in 1861 and named for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Excelsior", requires a player in a given chess problem to deliver checkmate with the least likely piece or pawn?
- ...that grasshopper chess is a variant game in which a fairy piece grasshopper, represented by an inverted queen figurine, begins in the game in any of several placements but moves invariably by hopping over another piece at any distance to the square directly beyond the piece?
- ...that Indian Koneru Humpy (pictured), the youngest-ever female Grandmaster, was given the forename Hampi at her birth but was subsequently given the more Russian-sounding name Humpy by her father?
- ...that because its sponsor and organizer, Luis Rentero, is a strong opponent of short draws, the Linares-Morelia chess tournament employs a nontraditional tiebreaker, awarding places on the basis of total wins?
- ...that undermining is a chess tactic in which a defensive piece is captured, leaving an opponent's piece undefended or underdefended and obliging the opponent, usually to his detriment, to choose between recapturing or saving the underdefended piece?
[edit] April 23, 2007 to May 13, 2007
- ...that Swiss Grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi, pictured, won four Soviet Union national championships, two Candidates tournaments, and six Chess Olympiad team gold medals and qualified twice to play for the world championship but never earned the world title, having fallen by a combined twelve games to seven to Soviet Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov?
- ...that Beersheba, situated in the Negev desert in Israel, is home to eight grandmasters and, with one such player for every 22,875 residents, has the greatest concentration of grandmasters of any world city?
- ...that of the eleven players to have earned the grandmaster title from the Fédération Internationale des Échecs prior to attaining the age of fifteen, three, including Sergey Karjakin, the youngest-ever grandmaster, hail from Ukraine?
- ...that the nature of the origins of chess is highly controversial and that at least two games, the Persian and Indian shatranj and the Chinese xiangqi, and nine geographic locations are advanced as possible geneses for the game?
- ...that, whilst Reuben Fine's rule that an advantage of a rook or its equivalent should be necessary for one to win a pawnless endgame is demonstrably incorrect, most pawnless endgames featuring a two- or three-point differential are theoretical draws under the fifty-move rule?
[edit] August 22, 2006 to April 23, 2007
- ...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?
[edit] July 14 to August 22, 2006
- ...that Jonathan Penrose, whose father Lionel was a leading chess theorist of the 1930s, having captured the British Chess Championship ten times between 1958 and 1969, and having in 1961 won the Fédération Internationale des Échecs International Master title, began participating in correspondence chess in the mid-1970s, eventually earning a Grandmaster title from the International Correspondence Chess Federation?
- ...that pion coiffé is a form of chess handicap in which the stronger player is required to give checkmate with a particular pawn designated prior to the start of play, typically with the condition that the pawn not be promoted, thought by Sicilian author Pietro Carrera to disadvantage a player in a similar fashion to queen odds, in which the stronger player, given the white pieces, plays without his queen?
- ...that Georgians Nona Gaprindashvili, the first female player to earn the International Grandmaster title, and Maia Chiburdanidze, were, respectively, the sixth and seventh women's world champions, having collectively held the title from 1962 to 1991 and having combined to defend their titles against three countrymates—Nana Alexandria, Elena Akhmilovskaya, and Nana Ioseliani?
- ...that Belgian George Koltanowski (né Colton) played, in 1937 in Edinburgh, Scotland, 34 simultaneous games whilst blindfolded, setting a world record still recognized by Guinness World Records?
- ...that Grandmaster Efim Geller, pictured, twice a winner of the Soviet Union Chess Championship, finished his career with an even or positive winning percentage against world champion Grandmasters Dutchman Max Euwe, countrymates Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Mikhail Tal, and Tigran Petrosian, and American Bobby Fischer?
[edit] July 3 to July 14, 2006
- ...that Russian Grandmaster Peter Svidler, having defeated Hungarian Grandmaster Péter Lékó in 2003 at the Mainz Chess Classic, contested in the eponymous city in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, and having defended his title against Armenian Grandmaster Levon Aronian and Hungarian Grandmaster Zoltan Almasi, is generally recognized as the Chess960 (originally, Fischer Random Chess) world champion?
- ...that between the 10th (held in 1952) and 29th (held in 1990 Chess Olympiads, the Soviet Union team claimed the team gold medal in every non-boycotted iteration save the 23rd, played in 1978 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in which Hungary, behind Grandmaster Lajos Portisch, pictured infra, who scored 10 points across his 14 games to achieve an ELO performance rating of 2691, and Grandmaster Gyula Sax, who won a third board bronze medal and defeated Yugoslav Grandmaster Aleksandar Matanović in the final round to secure the Hungarian victory?
- ...that Tasman Grandmaster Ian Rogers and Victorian Grandmaster Darryl Johansen, respectively, the first- and second-ever Australian players to attain the Grandmaster title, combined to win nine of the fourteen Australian national championships held between 1980 and 2006?
Image:Lajos Portisch grandmaster.jpg
- ...that German Grandmaster Robert Hübner and American Grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff sought, during a university team championship in 1972 in Graz, Austria, to draw a game in just one move–a draw was mutually beneficial to the teams each represented–but were ordered by arbiters to continue and so played a series of bizarre moves before once more attempting to draw the game, which was ultimately declared a forfeit victory for Rogoff?
[edit] June 16 to July 3, 2006
- ...that Searching for Bobby Fischer, a film based loosely on the life of International Master Josh Waitzkin and featuring cameo appearances by Grandmasters Joel Benjamin and Roman Dzindzichashvili, was voted by the American Film Institute as the 96th-most inspirational English language film of all-time in 2006?
- ...that former women's world champion Susan Polgar gave a simulatenous exhibition in Palm Beach, Florida, in July 2005 in which she played 1,131 consecutive games, including 326 at once, winning 1,096 and setting four world records?
- ...that American Paul Morphy, who played prior to the institution of the world chess championship, is nevertheless widely considered to have been the sport's first world champion and was so viewed contemporaneously, including by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who called Morphy the best player in the world?
- ...that Tigran Petrosian, who once was awarded a Master of Philosophy diploma for his Chess Logic thesis, is the titular inspiration for two major opening systems, one in the King's Indian Defence and the other in the Caro-Kann Defence?
- ...that a 2005 endgame tablebase analysis demonsrated that, with perfect play by each player, a player with four knights may deliver checkmate to a player with one queen in 85 moves?
[edit] May 26, 2006 to June 16, 2006
- ...that Boris Spassky won the second game of his world championship match against Bobby Fischer by forfeit when Fischer refused to play after organizers rejected his request to remove all cameras?
- ...that the number of possible chess games exceeds the number of atoms in the Universe?
- ...that the term checkmate comes from the Persian phrase Shah Mat (literally, the King ambushed)?
- ...that checkmate may be given in only two moves?
- ...that Ukraine's Sergey Karjakin is the youngest player ever to have been awarded the title of Grandmaster, having achieved the required performance aged 12 years and 7 months?
- ...that the current International Correspondence Chess Federation world champion is Joop van Oosterom, a Dutch billionaire who won the title despite having previously suffered a stroke?
[edit] July 14, 2005 to May 26, 2006
- … that after only four moves by each side, there are over 988 million possible distinct chess positions? [1]
- … that the number of possible chess games exceeds the number of atoms in the Universe?
- … that the game played in the 1963 James Bond movie From Russia with Love was an actual game won by Boris Spassky against David Bronstein in the 1960 USSR Championship?
- … that in 1937 IM George Koltanowski played 34 simultaneous blindfold games, scoring 24 wins and 10 draws over a period of 13.5 hours?
- ...that the term "Check Mate" comes from the ancient Persian saying-"Shah Mat" meaning Your king is dead?
- ...that it is possible to finish a chess game in just 2 turns?
