December 2018 – South Shields Chess Club

Christmas Themed Blitz – The Black Knights’ Tango

December 12, 2018

To help fill the winterval chess gap, made worse by the cancellation of the Durham Congress, we’re having a themed blitz tournament on the Thursday 20th December at the New Ship Inn. As usual, no entry fee, no prizes, no rating just lots of chess fun.

The theme is the Black Knights’ Tango. No, I hadn’t heard of it either until I saw John Boyd playing it in a league match a couple of weeks ago. Books (plural) have been written on this opening and John probably has them all. For the rest of us here is a video from the St Louis Chess Club explaining the opening.

Play will start after the moves 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 Nc6 with white to play.

Results can be found here

Dave Mooney had a good Knight .. and danced off with first place winning all 9 of his games , leaving Paul Bielby and Eddie Czestochowski to tango in joint second place with 7 wins a piece .

Top of the Christmas Tree

December 9, 2018

Happy Christmas Chess Friends. The Chess season has now reached the halfway point and it’s great to see our teams doing well , topping both the Northumberland and the Durham Chess leagues Division 1 and with our other teams sitting confortably in mid table in the other divisions. In the the early stages of the Ron Evers Quickplay one of our teams sits joint top .

Results and tables and remaining fixtures can be found on the top banner or on the respective Association websites.

Keep up the good work , have a great Christmas and come back refreshed in 2019 .

Carlsen-Caruana Redux – AlphaZero’s Take

December 1, 2018

12 games at normal time controls, 12 draws. A lot of people just looked at the result and said “Boring!“. For those of us (layabouts) who actually watched the games live, online there was a lot of exciting chess. It’s just that at key moments the players either rushed their moves and missed their opportunity (giving hope that they are, at least in that respect, just like us patzers) or they thought long and hard and then chickened out (again, something we can all can identify with). Then there was that winning move that Sesse identified which none of the experts could understand until they had sat in a darkened room for several hours studying the computer analysis.

Somebody who particularly enjoyed the games was GM Matthew Sadler. He and WIM Natasha Regan have been given access to AlphaZero to write a book about it which is coming out next year. Sadler, meanwhile, was allowed to maintain access to his new toy for the World Championships and followed the games with the benefit of analysis of AlphaZero. He has produced a number of videos examining AlphaZero’s analysis of the 12 games, themed according to the openings.

DeepMind’s AlphaZero on Carlsen-Caruana Games 1, 3, 5 & 8 (Sicilian Defence)

Games 2 & 7 (the QGD)

Games 4 & 6 (English & Petroff)

Games 10 & 12 (Sveshnikov Sicilian)

Games 11 & 9 (Petroff & English)

For contrast here are the thoughts of former world champion and reigning rapid world champion, Vishy Anand on the first 12 games given before the playoffs.