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.

The 1st Women's World Team Championship took place in Ekaterinburg (Russia) from 19th-30th May, with participation of 10 national teams from four continents. The list included Vera Menchik Cup holders Ukraine, as well as multiple gold medal winners China. All in all the event drew 17 GMs, 23 IMs and 4 FMs. Top rated teams were China (2455), Georgia (2454), Russia (2449) and Ukraine (2444). Most of World's top players arrived to Ekaterinburg, although some major teams (USA, Hungary) did not appear.

Chine were so dominant that they came beyond anyone else's reach in a race for gold still with last round to go. They edged Russia by full 6½ points, while Ukraine grabbed gold at 22½ points. Second seeds Georgia finished at disappointing fourth.


Not only did the Chinese win every match but one, but they won most of them heavily including three 4-0's against Botswana, Poland, and, somewhat incredibly, Russia.

Playing on board two below Zhao Xue, 13-year-old Hou Yifan made 7½/9 to take gold medal at board 2. Other individual medal winners were Zhao Xue, Inna Gaponenko (Ukraine), Ekaterina Kovalevskaya (Russia - she also won best rating performance prize) and Marta Przezdziecka of Poland.

See championship's official home page
See championship's home page at olimpbase.org

Szeged is a cozy city of 163,000 inhabitants situated in northern Hungary. It is mainly famous among the chess community from being birthplace of famous Hungarian player Geza Maroczy. Early May it hosted the 26th edition of annual Mitropa Cup - the friendly team tournament for Central European nations (a.o. France, Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria). The event was held separately for 10 men's teams in a four board round robin contest as well as for 10 women's doubles. The head organizer was Zsolt Korpics and the chief arbiter was respected WGM Zsuzsa Veroci.

The events drew 10 GMs and number of other titled players. The competition was extremely tough in both tournaments and the winners emerged in the last possible moments. France took the win in the men's competition ahead of disappointed Italy and Germany, last year's winners Hungary came barely 7th, even though they were top seeded having the home field advantage in pocket too.

In 4th edition of women's event Hungary managed to break all-time Slovenia's dominance to take their premier triumph ahead of the Slovenians and Slovakia. The top four teams finished within one game point making it closest Mitropa Cup competition ever. Germany, second in 2006, came one before last.

There was a surprise on the last day. The honorary guest was famous Hungarian athlete Katalin Kovacs, 21 times canoeing world champion. In 2008 the Mitropa Cup will arrive to Italy.

See official home page of the 2007 Mitropa Cup in Szeged

See detailed info & results from men's event from olimpbase.org
See detailed info & results from women's event from olimpbase.org

See olimpbase.org Mitropa Cup home page

It's been more than 20 years since the premier edition of the World Team Championship took off in Lucerne in 1985. The USSR team, led by the World Champion GM Karpov won in style ahead of Hungary and England. So far as much as six editions took place held in four year cycles. This invitation-only event, open for continental champions as well as top teams from preceding Olympiad, soon became prestigious and well-renowned tournament to attract many World's top players and drawing attention of the chess community, although it was never ever even close to the popularity and prestige of that earned by the Olympiads in its 80-year long history.

So far there was no separate competition for women, though women teams appeared twice in the history of the World Team Championship: Georgia in 1997 and China in 2005.

According to the resolutions written in the chapter D.III.08 of the FIDE Handbook the commencment of the Women's World Team Championship was scheduled in 2007. The www.fide.com website provides the latest news on the topic. The event is to take place from 19th to 30th May, 2007 in Ekaterinburg, Russia, the capital of Ural region. The venue will be the Atrium Palace Hotel.

There will be 10 teams participating, but which exactly, is still not clear. According to the FIDE handbook the following ten teams are eligible to participate:
a) the four continental champions of: Europe, Asia, Africa and The Americas
b) the top five teams from previous Olympiad
c) the host nation

If one of top five teams from the Olympiad have already qualified through a continental championship, then their place is taken by the following team in the respective continental championship.

If the hosts were one of top five teams at the Olympiad or, from any reason, one of these teams withdraws, then the following team from the Olympiad is eligible to participate. This is valid for all of the continental championships respectively.

According to the above, the following pool of teams should arrive at Ekaterinburg:

- The home team: Russia

- The top teams from the Turin 2006 Olympiad: Ukraine (1), China (3), USA (4), Hungary (5), Georgia (6) � Russia (2) already qualified as the host nation

- European Team Champions: Poland � from 2005 Euro Championship in Gothenburg
- Asian Team Champions: Vietnam � from 2005 Asian Championship in Esfahan
- Panamerican Team Champions: vacant (there is no Women's Panamerican Team Championship)
- African Team Champions: Algeria � from 2003 African Championship in Lagos

However, the sources aren't unanimous while listing the expected line-ups. Algeria is not included in most of the sources while Cuba are listed instead. Hungary are omitted by some and replaced by the Netherlands (7th in Turin). Even Armenia (8th in Turin) is provided as the participant by some sources including www.fide.com. Time will tell. We will update the news as soon as more reliable info will be available.

The contest will be run on an all-play-all basis; each team shall play one match against every other team. The time limit is 40 moves in 90 minutes, then 30 minutes for the rest of the game. An increment of 30 seconds per move, starting from move one, will be added after each move. Teams are composed of 4 players and one reserve. A hand-made cup from Ural stone will be handed to the winning team.

The final placement will be decided by the following criteria:
a) match points
b) game points
c) direct result
d) board count (a.k.a. the Berlin system, wins on higher boards are preferred)
e) rapid tie-break

History of Men's World Team Championship at OlimpBase

Information at www.fide.com
Information from Ekaterinburg info site (in Russian)
Information from Ural region info site (in Russian)