Do you know who Britney Spears' manager is? Do you care? Okay, I admit having read a news item about the breakup between Britney Spears and her previous manager, but, of course, that was not because of the news itself, but because it involved Brit...
It's clear that the New in Chess publishers are experimenting. In the past, they have mostly published high-quality opening books for the serious chess student, written by famous grandmasters such as Morozevich and Bologan. With The Black Lion, wr...
Should mind drugs be allowed or forbidden in chess competition? Less than two weeks after super GM?Ǭ†Vassily?Ǭ†Ivanchuk missed a doping test at the Olympiad, scientists in Nature published an article that says 'cognitive enhancement' should be a...
There are many excellent chess books on the market. For the serious chess student, it's not always easy to choose between them. Sometimes, it's worth picking up a book by an author you don't know yet. You may be pleasantly surprised. I didn't know...
In a short period of time, two very interesting Dutch chess books were published: Schaaktalent ontwikkelen by Karel & Merijn van Delft, and Schaken voor huisvrouwen by Karel van der Weide. We make an exception to our normal policy, and publish...
FIDE is failing terribly in dealing with the Topalov-Kamsky match in a correct and transparent way. It's also clear to virtually everyone that the FIDE President and his staff have generally ruined the whole system in the past ten years or more, d...
From time to time on this site I have tried to discuss chess from a philosophical point of view. No wonder: chess is very often the subject of philosophical discussions. In the past, famous philosophers like Rousseau and Wittgenstein have used che...
A couple of weeks ago I wrote that the New in Chess Yearbook series was one of the few 'scientific' chess books that we have in the chess scene. So I thought this would be a good occasion to do a review of the latest Yearbook to see if that statem...
It's well-known that chess is not only a game, not only art, but also science. I myself became fascinated by chess not because you could beat your granddad with it, or because you could play beautiful attacking games, but because you could look th...
I was selling books in the windy hallway of De Moriaan in Wijk aan Zee for Chess and Go Shop Het Paard. It was quiet, a regular week day.By Arne MollThere was practically no audience for the games. It was one of the last years of the nineties. I h...
All three games were decisive in the 6th round of Biel today. Carlsen beat Pelletier and the statisticians will probably start calculating again to see if he has finally overtaken Anand on the virtual rating list.By Arne MollClick here to download...
Chess and math have always slept side by side. But are they a happy couple? I think every chess player has had the experience of someone asking you, in high school, if your math grades were as good as your chess results. Sadly, for me the answer w...
Because I don't think it's really possible to write a serious review about an opening book unless you regularly play that opening yourself, I have not written about Viktor Moskalenko's previous opening book, The Fabulous Budapest Gambit. This revi...
One of the strangest books I've ever read is Bach en het Getal (Bach and the Number) by the Dutch authors Kees van Houten en Marinus Kasbergen. The main thesis of the book is that within the music of the great composer J.S. Bach, various messages,...
Yesterday, Peter wrote an interesting article about the Turkish club competition. I was especially fascinated by the team-setup.By Arne Moll"Teams consist of 10 boards, in which the first four boards can be filled freely but on the fifth board, a ...
Finally, a great chess player has written an entire book on one of the most fascinating opening variations of modern chess theory: Slav with 4...a6, or the Chebanenko Slav. And the author, GM Victor Bologan, is not just a great player, he's also a...
Are draws, or even quick draws, a problem? You might think so if you read the endless strain of articles on ChessBase (creating their own hype, they've decided to call it 'The Great Draw Debate') and elsewhere about the so-called 'problem of short...
For years, Kasparov has claimed that life imitates chess. Until now, I've had a difficult time believing this, if only because life was here before chess, and because chess is a model of life rather than the other way around.by Arne MollI know, it...
The game of chess attracts many different people. In Amsterdam chess cafes you will see artists, tramps, intellectuals and experienced hustlers. Many have written about them, usually in painful stereotypes, sometimes in amiable poetry.By Arne Moll...
Wordt het schaakspel uiteindelijk door vaste regels en logica beheerst, of is het gewoon een 'random' spelletje? Een vergelijking met de wetenschap. door Arne Moll Enige tijd geleden schreef ik een artikel over de toekomst van schaakkenn...
The second has just started and it promises new excitement. We're looking forward to Topalov-Ivanchuk but of course there's also Kramnik-Radjabov - for the KID fans: Radja did go for 2...g6 and 3...Bg7. And Nigel Short put up another... Evans Gamb...
ChessVibes-editor IM Merijn van Delft has won first prize in the Weihnachts Open tournament that was held 27-30 December in Hamburg. (Yes, there are still tournaments without world class players!) After a convincing first half, a couple of draws i...
In my previous review I discussed last year's World Championship match between Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov according to the book On the Edge of Elista by the Bulgarians Topalov and Ginchev. About the same time as the review, From Lond...
When the editor in chief asked me to review this book, I knew it wasn't going to be easy. Almost everything has already been said about the controversial match between Veselin Topalov and Vladimir Kramnik, which was held in Elista slighty more th...
