European Team Championships was held in Crete, Greece from 27 October to 7 November 2007. There were 40 men's and 30 women's, each one comprised of four players and a reserve. The system of play was nine round Swiss and the final order was decided by match points while game points were controversially used for purposes of tie-splitting (it is commonly believed Buchholz is more fair as tie-break).

The event drew most top European players, including Topalov, Svidler, Morozevich, Adams, Mamedyarov, Ivanchuk and Shirov. As much as 66 men were rated +2600.

In the men's teams tournament, Russia conquered the title after showing excellent performance scoring 8 wins and one draw. Svidler scored magic 6/7 at top board while player #2 was Morozevich with 6/8. The victory against Israel in the last round's decider was crucial for Armenia who finished second (best player Sargissian 6.5/9). The young Azeri team took bronze after beating France in the last round edging out Poland who recovered greatly after miserable start. Incumbent champions Holland finished in poor 19th.

In the women's teams event, Russia scored 6 wins and 3 draws to take their first title ever (no nation managed to win the title more than once!). Poland, the titleholders, came second while bronze was taken by surprise Armenia. Best individual result was scored by Nemcova of the Czech republic - 7.5/9.

FINAL RESULTS MEN (see details here):
1. Russia 17
2. Armenia 14
3. Azerbaijan 13
4. Poland, Ukraine, Israel 12
...(40)

FINAL RESULTS WOMEN (see details here):
1. Russia 15
2. Poland 13
3. Armenia 13
4. Ukraine, Georgia, Slovenia 12
...(30)

See OlimpBase info&result page: men, women
See European Team Championship all-time statistics: men, women

See tournament home page
See daily report at chessdom.com

The sun­ny Tur­kish res­ort Ke­mer ho­sted 23rd Euro­pe­an Club Cup to meet 56 men's and 18 wo­men's teams in this an­nual competition. The event drew most World's top players.

With a convincing last day 4-2 win over Economist SGSEU-1 Saratov, Linex-Magic had won the European Club Cup for the first time in their short history. In the final match Kamsky, Rublevsky and Cheparinov scored important victories against Alexeev, Tiviakov and Roiz repectively. The team from Merida (Spain) won the tournament with 13 points out of 7 matches. Second finished Ural Sverdlovskaya and shared third were Tomsk-400 and OSC Baden-Baden. In the women’s section, Cercle d’Echecs de Monte-Carlo only needed to score one game point to grab the cup and that was exactly what they did: a surprising last-round loss (1-3) against AVS Krasnoturinsk was just enough.

The winning team consisted of Gata Kamsky (3/7), Michael Adams (4.5), Sergey Rublevsky (5.5), Gabriel Sargissian (4.5), Ivan Cheparinov (6) and Manuel Perez Candelario (5). On board one, Krishnan Sasikiran had the best tournament of all with a 85.7% score (6/7, a performance rating of 2806). Alexei Shirov scored the highest performance rating (2875). Shakhryiar Mamedyarov, Pavel Eljanov, Peter Svidler and Sergei Rublevsky also scored performances above 2800. Humpy Koneru, who passed the 2600 mark on the October FIDE rating list, continues her fantastic year with an amazing 5.5 out of 6 and a 2800 performance in the women’s section.

FINAL RESULTS (MEN):

 1 Linex Magic - Merida      7   6   1   0   13   28,5   174,0
 2 Ural Sverdlovskaya        7   5   2   0   12   31,0   157,5
 3 Tomsk-400                 7   5   1   1   11   29,0   174,0
 4 Baden-Baden               7   4   3   0   11   28,5   161,0
 5 Chess Club Zagreb         7   5   0   2   10   31,5   134,0
 6 Economist Saratov         7   5   0   2   10   28,0   156,0
 7 Zeljeznicar Sarajevo      7   5   0   2   10   28,0   153,5
 8 Keystone Kyiv             7   5   0   2   10   27,5   158,5
 9 Bosna Sarajevo            7   4   2   1   10   26,0   183,0
10 Aquaprofit Nagykanisza    7   5   0   2   10   26,0   160,0
(total of 56 teams)

FINAL RESULTS (WOMEN):

 1 CE Monte-Carlo            7   5   1   1   11   20,0   104,0
 2 AVS Krasnoturinsk         7   5   1   1   11   19,0   109,5
 3 MIKA Yerevan              7   5   0   2   10   19,0    99,5
 4 Southern Ural Cheliabinsk 7   5   0   2   10   18,0   115,0
 5 Finek St.Petersburg       7   5   0   2   10   18,0   104,5
 6 Economist Saratov         7   4   0   3    8   17,5    99,0
 7 SK Podgorica              7   3   2   2    8   16,0   105,5
 8 Interplast Tbilisi        7   3   2   2    8   15,5   120,0
 9 Utrecht                   7   3   1   3    7   14,0    88,5
10 Ladya Kazan               7   3   1   3    7   13,0   107,0
(total of 18 teams)

See tournament's home page
See ChessBase.com report
See ChessVibes.com report
See results at chess-results.com: men and women

Sad news arrived from Malta. Mario Serracino-Inglott, a prominent figure in Maltese chess and devoted friend of OlimpBase (it is him who provided with the unavailable results of the 1980 Chess Olympiad) died at 73 on Saturday, 22nd September 2007.

He was born in Cospicua in 1934. In 1953 he became a clerk at the Dockyard and two years later he joined the civil service as a clerical officer, retiring in 1985 to teach Maltese at Stella Maris College. He also used to be a vice-president of Akkademja tal-Malti.

He had three Big Loves in his life: apart from his family, wife Joan Antida and daughter Lara, they were both inherited from his father: the Maltese language and chess. Since 1983, he had been editing unpublished Maltese manuscripts of his father Erin Serracino-Inglott including one named Il-Miklem Malti. He also compiled his own dictionary and thesaurus, Dizzjunarju Malti. For a number of years he was a teacher of Maltese. For him Maltese was "a great and beautiful language that is second to no other language and that first and foremost makes us what we are - Maltese."

His chess achievements were no worse making him one of most important figures in the history of Maltese chess. In 1947 he was first and youngest ever Malta junior champion. He also wrote a book on a history of chess in Malta 1800-1990. Although he never committed himself to a professional chess career he took part in two international chess tournaments: in La Spezia (Italy) and Yugoslavia in 1957. For many years he served as president of the Malta Chess Association. In 1980 he was the first Maltese to be officially awarded the title of the International Chess Arbiter (IA). On that year he was co-organizer of the 24th Chess Olympiad in La Valletta.

Relatives remembered him as an avid chess player, a classical music and opera fan, a man with an eye for detail, a lover of culture in general, and in particular of all that contributes to the national identity, his memory lives on forever in his works.

My own relationship with Mario was fruitful and truly inspiring. Despite of his age and declining health he was very optimistic and benevolent personality, open for new challenges and helpful to the others. He greatly contributed to growth of our archives, sending original bulletins from Malta 1980 Olympiad; he was also so nice to write an essay with his reminiscences from past years exclusively for OlimpBase readers. It means even more for us these sad days.

He will be deeply missed by the international chess community.
May you rest in peace, Mario.

Wojtek Bartelski
OlimpBase Head Webmaster

The city of Liverpool was founded in 1207 as King John issued letters patent to announce the foundation of the borough of Liverpool. Thus in 2007 the city celebrates its 800th birthday. From September 4th to 9th the city hosted a 800th Anniversary Summit Chess Match UK-China. Teams of six male and two female players competed in a Scheveningen-style match.The rate of play was all moves in 2 hrs plus 30 seconds per move. The English team included both Michael Adams and Nigel Short, the first time for almost 20 years that the two have played together in an event on British soil. The Chinese team included top stars Wang Yue, Bu Xiangzhi and Ni Hua, plus 13-year old schoolgirl sensation Hou Yifan. Alongside the match, there was also a nine-round International Open, with a prize fund in the region of £10,000-£12,000.

China defeated the UK team by an emphatic 28 points to 20. The decisive factor was undoubtedly the Chinese players' tenacity and staying power. UK team captain Jonathan Speelman commented in his speech at the Closing Ceremony that "(...) had the match been using that revolting English custom of adjudicating the games after four hours' play, the final result would have been a lot closer!" Indeed it would - time after time, the British players saw precious half points slip through their fingers in the fifth and six hours' of play, as the pressure of the time-limit, plus the incredible staying power and resourcefulness of the Chinese players proved too much.

The guest of honour at the Closing Ceremony was Mr Gong, the Consul-General at the Chinese Consulate in Manchester.

The open tournament saw victory of German GM Daniel Fridman (7/9) who came ahead a group of seven, of which podium placed were taken by GM Berg (Sweden) and GM Dgebuadze (Belgium) - 6.5/9 both.

UK (20p): GM Adams 3.5, GM Short 3, GM Rowson 1.5, GM Pert 1.5, GM Jones 2.5, GM Howell 2, IM Arakhamia-Grant 6, IM Houska 2
China (28p): GM Wang Yue 4, GM Wang Hao 4, GM Zhang Pengxiang 4, GM Bu Xiangzhi 3.5, GM Ni Hua 4, WGM Hou Yifan 2.5, WGM Shen Yang 6, WFM Ding Yixin 3.5

see tournament's homepage
see ChessBase report

/ taken from www.chessbase.com /

August 11, 2007 was the day of a historic triumph of Indian squad, who won first ever World Youth Olympiad gold for their country in a 12-year long history of the event. The growing popularity of the World Youth U16 Olympiads drew 34 teams from 24 countries to Singapore, where 12th edition took place. The level of play was decent (3 IMs and a number of other titled players) although vast majority of European countries failed to arrive. Two by far strongest teams were India and Hungary.

The tournament victory was decided on round 5, when India hammered the Hungarians with a thumping 3.5-0.5 to retain the lead despite of unexpected 3-1 loss to the Philippines in round 7. The Hungarians, who had very bad time in the middle of the tournament took silver after impressive final spurt. The Filipino team comprised of 13-year old prodigy IM Wesley So (Elo 2516) and three unrated newbies. So's fantastic 9.5/10 supported by very good play of the rest of boys let the team take sensational bronze. Third seeds Australia took fifth place as sort of consolation.

India's success was fully deserved (despite poor loss vs the Philippines) and all five members of the team contributed to the overall victory. The victorious Indian team comprised of IM Adhiban, Ashwath, FM Nitin, Shyam Nikhil and Swayams Mishra.

Next Olympiad is scheduled in Turkey in 2008.

see Olympiad report at olimpbase.org
see full statistics at chess-results.com

see World Youth U16 Olympiads overview

Egyptian men's and Algerian women's teams were capable of defending their gold medals from 2003 in the African team chess competition that recently concluded in Algiers, Algeria.

Although chess became part of the All-Africa Games (African Olympics) only in 2003 the tournament is the only African team event (the Continental Championship hasn't been played for quite a while) and also the World Team Championship qualifier. Due to time shortages this is rapid chess tournament.

There was no surprise in men's event, which was a 13 team round-robin. Mighty Egyptian team led by IM El-Gindy won 11 matches and drew one to take first place (40/48). South Africa came second and Zambia were third, as in 2003.

There women's top three from previous Games changed by no means: Algeria (led by H.Toubal) took gold, while South Africa finished as runners-up. Nigeria won third spot. Botswana, who produced pathetic 0/36 at recent World Team Championship came in fourth place. Egpyt, the newcomers, gave remarkable start, i.e. beating South Africa 3-1, to deny their dreams about gold.

The 10th All-Africa Games are due in Lusaka, Zambia in 2011. Chess will most probably be the part of the games too.

The organisation and the coverage was very bad. The web site is not very legible and unstable. There are no game scores anywhere (can anybody help maybe?). Also, there is really very little information on the issue.

OlimpBase result& info pages: men, women

9th All-Africa Games home page

The Chess Drum blog - 2007 All-Africa Games topic

Subotica (Serbia) was the host city of the 7th European U18 Team Championship, open for boys and girls born after 1.1.1989. There were 12 teams in boys' section and 10 teams in girl's event. The format of the competition was a seven round Swiss, played at four and two board for boys and girls respectively.

As usual, majority of Western European teams boycotted the competition. The only teams outside of Eastern bloc were Finland and Scotland. There was absolutely no surprise in the run for gold. Hungarian boys and Romanian girls were clear favourites and did not let their fans down. Biggest upset of the competition was Turkey's silver in the boys event.

Results boys: 1. Hungary; 2. Turkey; 3. Croatia
Results girls: 1. Romania; 2. Serbia "A"; 3. Montenegro

Montenegro won their first ever medal in chess, and who knows, maybe overall, since they re-gained independence in July 2006.

The organizers greeted their guests with warm hospitality and the memories will definitely be very good. We hope that next year the competition will attract much more European teams.

2007 Subotica Championship home page (very good!)

2007 Subotica Championship info from olimpbase.org: boys & girls

Euro U18 Team Championship history at olimpbase.org

It could be a case of game over for draughts - scientists say the ancient board game has finally been solved.

A Canadian team has created a computer program that can win or draw any game, no matter who the opponent is.

It took an average of 50 computers nearly two decades to sift through the 500 billion billion possible draughts positions to come up with the solution.

Writing in the journal Science, the team said it was the most challenging game solved to date.

Jonathan Schaeffer, lead author on the paper and chair of the department of computer science at the University of Alberta, Canada, told the BBC News website: "This was a huge computational problem to solve - more than a million times bigger than anything that had ever been solved before."

Trial and error

Professor Schaeffer, who admits he is "awful" at draughts (also known as checkers), began his attempts to solve the board game in 1989.

He consulted champion players to find out more about their game tactics and then fed this information into a computer program called Chinook.

Chinook looked at solving problems much like a human does by using trial and error to find out what appeared to be the best solutions. This is called a heuristic approach.

However, Professor Schaeffer said that although the program was extremely successful - it won the World Checkers Championship in 1994 - it was not perfect and occasionally lost games.

So the computer scientists tried another non-heuristic tack, for which, over a number of years, hundreds of computers ran through game upon game of draughts to work out the sequences that would lead to winning, losing and drawing.

Eventually, the new program gathered so much information that it "knew" the best move to play in every situation. This meant that every game it played led to a certain win, or, if its opponent played perfectly, a draw.

Professor Schaeffer said: "I think we've raised the bar - and raised it quite a bit - in terms of what can be achieved in computer technology and artificial intelligence."

With the vast number of playing possibilities, draughts is the most complex game to have been solved to date - it was about a million times more complicated to solve than Connect Four.

Researchers are now hoping to move on to even bigger problems. However, it seems that grand master of the board games - chess - may remain unsolved for some time.

It has somewhere in the range of a billion billion billion billion billion possible positions, meaning that computers, with their current capacity, would takes aeons to solve it.

Originally cited by BBC.