Begonia Chess Festival

From The Courier: a brief report on the Begonia Festival. PR man Chris Segrave on the first champion, Ernest Greenhalgh: "He was obviously a very good chess player. He trained as a school teacher and taught schools in the western district and his main interests were maths, chess and the stock market".

And I can't help but slip this one in - a bit of news from the US with at least two chessic connections. You may have to look more closely for the second one.

Is Tornelo Breaking the Law?

This afternoon, while in the midst of one of the biggest quakes to hit Tokyo, I received this strange unsolicited email.

Welcome to Australian Chess Ratings Tornelo!

Tornelo is friendly, web-based tournament management and ratings software.

We have created your free Australian Chess Ratings Tornelo account. With an account you can:
* Enter a tournament
* Update your player profile
* Use the Electronic Scoresheet during tournaments (through your smart phone)
* View ratings, player profiles, pairings, results and games
* Club Admins can also promote tournaments online, collect entries, submit for ratings and display live results and games

To log-in to Tornelo please use the following details:

Visit: http://auschess.tornelo.com/sign_in
Email: ********
Temporary Password: ***********

Please update your password to something you will remember when you first log-in. If you forget your password you will need access to your email to reset it.

Have fun using Tornelo and thanks for being part of our community.

- The Tornelo Pixie

PS. We love feedback and we are hungry to improve! Let your imagination run wild with possibilities - we're eager to hear ideas from players and organisers about new features that Tornelo could use.

Well, Tornelo Pixie, I'm sure you love feedback. Here it is: you may have just broken the law. The Anti-Spam Laws.

I have never heard of Tornelo. I never signed up to them. So how they acquired my email address is beyond me. Hec, they've even created a user ID and a password then sent those in the email! Genius.

I'll be reporting you.

UPDATE (11 Mar, 8:59PM): Apparently, I subscribed to a Robert Jamieson enewsletter that is put out by Chess Kids. I'm confident that I didn't. Why in the world would I subscribe to an enewsletter for beginners?

But suppose I did. Let's take a look at their subscription page. Nope, no privacy provisions there. No fine print about being signed up to every affiliated company of the Chess Group, whoever they are.

I just searched my inbox and it looks like I've got another unexplained subscription. This time it's for "On The Move", apparently from the same mob. Nope, didn't subscribe to that one either. I can't even find the subscription page. That's because there isn't one!

I think I've got somebody by the balls.

Chess & Chicks Don't Mix

I don't know about this:

[T]he Chess Olympiad and the world chess championship are in the highest level of chess competition. Going down to ordinary chess-playing, many a wife, girlfriend or child has experienced problems with the husband, boyfriend or father because of the time he spends on this game. Due to this so-called "gymnastics of the mind", the chess lover tends to forget all his other loves. From my own experience, I concluded that "Chess and chicks don't mix."

From Bacolod's Sun Star paper.

Wohl on Laragate

I was going to post something else, but this latest entry by IM Alex Wohl had me laughing over some cheap chianti. His take on the whole Laragate affair (well, I had to come up with something).

She goes by many names and is a master of disguise. If you spot her do not approach but immediately inform Steve Giddons (sic), secret agent 000 who has a special licence to blow anything out of all proportion. All of the worlds chess enforcement forces are now looking for the pair including Chessbase and Chessvibes. Even the Closetgrandmaster has mobilized his considerable resources to try apprehend her.

So who won?

I just love this. It's an old story, but it reminds me of one of the best things in life. Late night blitz.




There's more on this by Macauley Peterson over on Chess Life Online from way back in December. Rightly so, Macauley is keeping the final score a secret. Being a Nakamura fan, I hope he won!

Reliable Stock Quote?

As the minor controversy over Lara "I'm no woman grandmaster" Stock dies down, there is still really one question left unanswered. Why? Why go through all that trouble?

In the English Chess Forum, Gareth Harley-Yeo, a Welsh chess player, claims to have been in contact with our troublesome Fraulein.

I decided to ask the horse:

Quote:
Lara Antonia Sofie Stock 05 March at 00:52 Report
actually .. i just wanted to play chess without media or any "special treatment". Just be a normal chessplayer not a wgm ..

Of course, the authenticity of that quote is yet to be confirmed.

Japanese Scores Fischer Money

A rare chess victory for Japan: Reuters reports, "An Icelandic court said on Thursday the widow of former world chess champion Bobby Fischer should inherit his estimated $2 million estate, which has been in dispute since his death in 2008."

Read more here.

The Colour of Titles

I must admit that when I posted yesterday's news about the drop-dead-gorgeous WGM Lara Stock winning a Kiwi event with a false name, I didn't expect that the two premiere chess news sites would quickly follow. The Germans can recognise a pretty face when they see one, but seem a tad coy about naming Lara. While our Dutch friends have at least managed to make Australia's 'rebel' chess forum very happy, indeed!

The most strident reaction so far, however, is from British Chess Magazine editor, FM Steve Giddins. Says he:

Despite the paltry rewards that their actions have earned them, it would be nice to see appropriate action taken, if only pour encourager les autres. Since the young lady is so keen not to let anyone know that she holds the WGM title, I think a good start would be to take away her title altogether. Throw in a life ban from all internationally rated chess, and that should make others think twice about trying the same tactic.

Maybe I'm just too much of a sucker for pretty blondes (if only they aged gracefully), but perhaps we should withold calling for her head until we understand why.

As Chessvibes pointed out, Lara quit playing competition chess in 2007. Maybe, just maybe, the pressures were too much for the then teenager and now she just prefers to get into the rough and tumble free from expectations. Just think: if this was all about cash, why not simply rock up to a local club or organiser and demand an appearance fee? Or just play in a big event. With her kind of horsepower in this part of the world, she'll easily finish among the prize winners.

So there you have it, none of us like fraud, but let's not be too hasty on this one.

At any rate, if she ever stops over in Tokyo en route back to Europe, I'm quite happy to take her around my local chess club. I might even drop her a line: "What you got in there?"

Foreigners Scam NZ Tournament

Just received a note this morning from Scott Humphreys, of the Hamilton CC in New Zealand, in which he relates the case of what appears to be an outright scam. A pair of players calling themselves Matteus Wagner and Carmen Lempert turned out to be father and daughter, Michael Stock and 18 year old WGM Lara Stock of Croatia!

Both players entered (get this) a rookies event and naturally finished in one-two spots. Here's a picture of the winners.

Image courtesy of Hamilton CC

Well, what can we say? At least she's hot.

UPDATE (3 March, 11.12): I just realised that my first link forces you to log in to Facebook. Here's an alternative link to the Hamilton CC homepage.

The Future of Chess

For €59.00, you could get your hands on what seems like an interesting read. It's "The Future of Post-Human Chess: A Preface to a New Theory of Tactics and Strategy" by Dr. Peter Baofu.

Here's a brief write-up:

[T]his book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the future of chess, especially in the context of strategy and tactics-while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). Thus, this book offers a new theory to go beyond the existing approaches in the literature on chess in a new way not conceived before.

This seminal project is to fundamentally alter the way that we think about chess, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its 'post-human' fate.