• Yet more local junior success

    ByDrDave

    n the Clubs/Organisations competition as part of the UK Chess Challenge, Exeter Junior Chess Club came out as South-West region winners.  Well done to them!

    South West  
    RankSchoolScoreNo. of PlayersGF QualifiersTF Qualifiers
    1Exeter Junior Chess Club21421
    2Bournemouth Junior Chess Club19321
    3Downend & Fishponds Chess Club17.5221
    4Frome Chess Club14220
    5Musketeers Junior Chess Club10210
    6Pete’s Potentials Chess Club8.5110
    7Wellington Chess Club7110
    8Wotton Hall Chess Club7110
    9Moonrakers Chess club6200
    10Ringwood Chess club5.5110

  • More #chess success for Devon juniors

    ByDrDave

    Congratulations to Caleb Caleshu who has won through to the U14 Terafinal of the UK Chess Challenge. Best of luck in the final from all at Devon Junior Chess!

  • National Success for Devon #chess junior

    ByDrDave

    Pengxiao Zhu took part in the British Online Chess Championships in August, winning the U10 Blitz trophy and a Performance Prize for the U10 Rapidplay competition.

    Many congratulations to Pengxiao from everyone at Devon Junior Chess!

  • Good, bad and OK pawn moves

    ByDrDave

    We’ve been going through the multiple-choice questions in Chess Choice Challenge, and some we have done quite quickly.  But this one took us most of a session to talk about!

    Chess Choice Challenge (Ward & Emms) Test 1, Q19
    Chess Choice Challenge (Ward & Emms) Test 1, Q19

    We struggled a bit with ‘unnecessary’ — surely none of are actually ‘necessary’?  But maybe some of them are good and some of them are bad.  Try and decide for yourself before reading on! 

    1. 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nxe5 d6 4. Nf3 Nxe4 5.d4 Be7 6. Bd3 Nf6 7. h3 — a good move, keeping Black’s Bishop on c8 from finding a good square

    2. 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 h6 — a bad move — Ng5 is not a threat now and won’t be next move either (even if your next move is 3…Nf6, but you have to know that one)

    3. 1. e4 d5 2. exd5 Qxd5 3. Nc3 Qa5 4. d4 Nf6 5. Nf3 Bg4 6. h3 — a good move, forcing the Bishop to make up its mind — we get the Bishop pair (6…Bxf3) or King’s-side space (6…Bh5 7.g4)

    4. 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5 4. Nf3 Bg7 5. Bg5 Ne4 6. cxd5 Nxg5 7. Nxg5 e6 8. Nf3 exd5 9. e3 O-O 10.b4 — a move that is part of a good plan, the minority attack, hoping to make use of the half-open c-file.  (That needs a good 10-minutes of explanation if you haven’t heard of it before!)

    So, only 2 is bad, so we decided the answer was C.  That was hard work!

  • Grotesque!

    ByDrDave

    Otto Blathy composed chess problems. But the ones he liked were a bit funny! The positions could never happen in a game, but they usually had a nice idea in them.
    These gnarly positions are called grotesques.

    Mr.B showed me this one many years ago: White to play and win! Black is moving down the board — well, that’s if they could move…

    Puzzle 1

    Hints and answers

    And I just found this one: White to play and win, again

    Puzzle 2

    So, they’re quite long, for a chess puzzle, but there is really just one idea to find — if you can!

    Otto also holds a world record, for the longest solution to a chess problem. How long? Mate in 290! Surely that’s a draw under the 50-move rule? Well, actually no! But the solution is so long it broke my database… White could win if Black did something silly, like 1…Bb7, letting White make a new Queen. But Black has lots of other things to do! Well, we can wait…

    Puzzle 3

    Hints and answers

    Puzzle 1

    Hints for Puzzle 1 (click-drag to select)

    1. If Black moves either Knight, White can checkmate with the Knight
    2. If White moves their Knight, Black can move a Knight without losing, and then the g-pawn, and then get the Queen out, and then White loses.
    3. At the moment, Black can only shuffle the Queen up and down.
    4. If White moves the King to a light square from the corner, Black can check with a Knight, and then hop back…
    5. So White can move Kg7, (Black goes Qh3), Kg6 (no …Ne4+ because of mate, so Black goes Qh4)… now what?
    6. It would be nice if White could go Kg6 when the Q is already on h4, then we would have …Qh3, Kxg5, Qh4+; Kxh4, then Black must move a Knight and lose.
    7. So can you lose a move with the King? Well, yes, but watch out that you don’t get checked!

    Puzzle 2

    Hints for Puzzle 2 (click-drag to select)

    1. Only the White Queen can move, and you can’t mate with Q alone
    2. You can chase the King around the board
    3. Maybe you can chase the King away from the action, and dash back to do… something!
    4. The something is… Qxh3! Then you have a passed pawn.

    Puzzle 3

    Hints for Puzzle 3

    1. Some puzzles are meant to be admired and not solved…

  • Said the Elephant to the Bishop…

    ByDrDave


    “What’s this piece called?”
    “A Bishop.”
    “What is it in Spanish, Sophie?”
    “Alfil”
    “And in French, Agathe?”
    “Fou!”

    Therein lies a story…

    The old Arab form of chess had a piece called the elephant, which, unlike most elephants I know, could jump two squares at a time, diagonally. And ‘al-fil’ means the Elephant in Arabic (Pil in Persian).

    But if you have a lump of stone, or wood, and you want to show that it is an elephant, you might carve two curving lines on it for tusks, or make two points on it to show the same.

    And if you then showed it to someone from England, you might hear them say, what’s that, a Bishop’s hat?

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Mitre_evolution.gif

    And if you showed it to someone from France, you might hear them say, what’s that, a hat for a jester, the court fool?

    http://a401.idata.over-blog.com/0/26/53/98/logos/eeg.jpg

    Here Bruno Fauditti has swapped a jester’s hat for a metal funnel:
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temp%C3%AAte_sur_l%27%C3%A9chiquier

    Now in modern Western chess, this piece doesn’t hop a little way, it can run right across the board. So the Germans adopted a different name for this piece, Läufer, the runner. There used to be played a version of chess in some parts of Germany which had both the old short-hopping Bishop, and the new long-running Currier, and that variant is called Courier Chess.

    http://www.chessvariants.com/historic.dir/courier.html

    There is a famous painting of some people playing this game:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courier_chess#/media/File:Lucas_van_Leyden…

    The Chinese form of chess still keeps the original piece with its original move; in fact, the name of the game, Xiang-Chi, means the Elephant Game.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi

  • Chess around the world

    ByDrDave

    I had a nice chat at the Spring tournament with Dr Pasupalety and Mr Sequiera, both of whom grew up playing chaturanga. This is thought to be the ancestor of many types of chess played now across the world.

    Chaturanga is a slow game, where the pawns can move only one square, there is no such thing as castling, and the Queen, called a Minister, is the weakest piece on the board!  The Bishops (Camels, or in some places Elephants) also had a different move.  When chess first came to Europe, it was in a form quite like this, and medieval chess had this same slow style.

    When Western chess-players started experimenting in the opening in the 1920s, they invented some defences where Black stayed away from the centre for a while, and these set-ups look like the set-ups used in chaturanga.  And that’s where we get the names King’s Indian Defence, Queen’s Indian Defence, and so on.

    When I first looked at the history of Western Chess, I thought that the original game was Chaturanga, a game played in India before 600AD. Chess as played in other countries seems to come from the Arab form of Chess called Shatranj. And that is what I used to tell people.

    But I now believe that the best picture that fits what we know says that Chaturanga and Shatranj were both later forms of an original game, which we don’t know much about. And whether China and Japan learned about chess from India or the Arab world, I don’t know.

    We know lots about shatranj, because there is a lot of writing about it.  Although the players were playing a different game, we can tell from their analysis that they were as good at shatranj as grandmasters are at chess.  In fact, al-Suli composed a chess problem that took hundreds of years for anyone to solve!

    I had thought of shatranj and chaturanga as part of chess history, so I was very tickled to meet people who had grown up with chaturanga as a living game.

    There are lots of different sorts of chess around the world that seem to come from the same stock, including:

    • Shatar (Mongolian Chess)
    • Sittuyin (Burmese Chess)
    • Makruk (Thai Chess)

    Each form of chess seems to have its own special rule that makes the game come alive. Burmese chess is the only sort of chess where you can decide where to put your pieces at the start of the game; Japanese chess is the only sort of chess that uses the ‘drops’ that we see in Exchange Chess; Chinese Chess is the only sort of chess that has the Cannon piece; modern Western Chess is the only sort of chess that has the super-duper Queen. (In fact, our game used to be called Le Jeu de la Dame enragée — the game with the Mad Queen!).  Castling, and the double-first-move of the pawn, are also later inventions in the Western tradition.

    You can read about all these different sorts of chess here:
    http://chessvariants.org/
    http://www.ancientchess.com/page/free-downloads.htm

  • Exeter Juniors 1-3 Exeter School 22nd May 2015

    ByDrDave

    Exeter Juniors 1-3 Exeter School 22nd May 2015

    default 0-1 Leif HAFSTAD
    Ethan HWANG 1-0 Henry COLEMAN
    Felix WATTS 0-1 Redmond COLEMAN
    Ned RICHARDS 0-1 Nick ARMSTRONG

    In a close match, where many of the players relied for support on a
    mysterious brown elixir, the visiting team had an early boost when the
    home team top board didn’t arrive.

    It looked as though the home team was going to score a rapid equaliser
    when a mate-in-one appeared on board 3, but the opportunity passed by.
    The material balance wobbled several times before Redmond found a
    back-rank mate later in the game.

    Some excellent aggressive play from both sides on board 4 was also
    brought to a close when Nick spotted a snap mate.

    In the best game of the match, Henry tripled down the e-file, pinning
    down all of Black’s pieces. Ethan then sent his Queen off in search of
    counterplay, but it became cut off from the e-file, whence White could
    have delivered the fatal blow. But the Queen proved distracting
    enough, and gradually Black unhooked the pin and exchanged off
    into a Rook endgame. White then allowed a Rook exchange when Black had
    a distant passed pawn, and the home team finally scored a point.

    Games to follow.

  • The chess family tree

    ByDrDave

    Last week the juniors saw the game of Shogi played. It’s the sort of chess played in Japan, and by our new friends Kaz and Hatzune. How is Shogi related to the sort of chess that we normally play?

    When I first looked at the history of Western Chess, I thought that the original game was Chaturanga, a game played in India before 600AD. Chess as played in other countries seems to come from the Arab form of Chess called Shatranj. And that is what I used to tell people.

    Chaturanga --> Shatranj --> Medieval chess --> Modern Western chess
                        ---------------------> Chinese Chess (Xiang-Chi)
                        ---------------------> Japanese Chess (Shogi)

    But I now believe that the best picture that fits what we know says that Chaturanga and Shatranj were both later forms of an original game, which we don’t know much about.

    Sort-of-Chess --> Chaturanga 
                  --> Shatranj --> Medieval chess --> Modern Western chess
                               ---------------------> Chinese Chess (Xiang-Chi)
                               ---------------------> Japanese Chess (Shogi)

    There are lots of different sorts of chess around the world that seem to come from the same stock, including:

    Shatar (Mongolian Chess)
    Sittuyin (Burmese Chess)
    Makruk (Thai Chess)

    Each form of chess seems to have its own special rule that makes the game come alive. Burmese chess is the only sort of chess where you can decide where to put your pieces at the start of the game; Japanese chess is the only sort of chess that uses the ‘drops’ that we see in Exchange Chess; Chinese Chess is the only sort of chess that has the Cannon piece; modern Western Chess is the only sort of chess that has the super-duper Queen. (In fact, our game used to be called le Jeu de la Dame enragée — the game with the Mad Queen.)

    You can read about all these different sorts of chess here:
    http://chessvariants.org/
    http://www.ancientchess.com/page/free-downloads.htm

  • Exeter Juniors 1-3 Broadclyst Primary 6th June 2014

    ByDrDave

    Having won our other two matches, we went into our last game with league
    victory assured, and so we ventured a younger team against Broadclyst
    Primary School, who for so long have been the core of Devon’s junior
    squad.

    When Ethan missed the start and Henry out-tricked himself, it looked as
    though we were going to struggle for any sort of result. Oliver set up
    a solid fortress while Redmond went fishing for chances against his
    opponent’s King. After Redmond hooked a mate and Oliver’s castle was
    breached, we went home with just one point.

    Ethan finally found the venue, and salvaged some honour by defeating the
    home side’s top board in a friendly game.

    Games to follow!