Play Online Chess, Free Chess Online, mailcafe.net

We are developing a brand new mailcafe.net! In the meanwhile...

Chess news:

Lines from Linares — The 27th edition of the Linares tournament is underway in the Andalucian town but the chess event has been affected by the economic slowdown. It was no surprise that the planned tie up with Dubai fell through and the organisers responded to budgetary pressures by reducing the size of the field. The chess tournament will be a six-player double round all play all and I am delighted to see that Francisco Vallejo, one of the strongest players Spain has ever produced, has been invited back. Veselin Topalov will be aiming to recapture the number one spot from Magnus Carlsen while Alexander Grischuk the Russian chess champion returns as winner of ...

At Gibraltar Chess Event, Women Begin to Close Gender Gap — Why aren’t there more great female chess players? One theory is that men are physically stronger and more aggressive by nature and therefore better suited at a game that simulates warfare. Another is that the talent pool among women has not been big enough to produce many great chess players. That has been changing over the last 20 years. And the results of the Eighth Gibtelecom Chess Festival in Gibraltar, which ended on Feb. 3, seems proof of that change. The chess tournament had a strong field that included 35 grandmasters, 5 of them ranked among the world’s top 40 players. The festival offered special prizes for women, and ...

The f-pawn, part 1: cheap, crude and obvious? — Is an f-pawn advance the chess game's equivalent of route-one football? RB For some time I've been nagging Dan to do a series of columns on the f-pawn advance. He's been resistant, partly, I suspect, because pushing the f-pawn is a bit like route-one football, the long ball punted down the park in hopes of a quick goal. The advance can sometimes be crude, obvious and speculative, but, like the infamous route-one game, it can also produce results, and, as we will see over the next few weeks, some very classy chess players have used it. We start with one of the classiest of all time, Botvinnik, in a chess game played in the decade before he became world chess champion. Having ...

At Halfway Point, Topalov Leads at Linares — The annual Ciudad de Linares chess tournament in Spain began earlier this week, and after five rounds — or halfway through — Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, the top seed and No. 2 chess player in the world, is leading with 3.5 points, a point ahead of the field. Linares has been among the world’s elite chess tournaments since the early 1990s, when Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov were regular competitors. This year’s tournament has only six players, though they are all among the world’s best. The format is a double round robin in which each chess competitor faces all the others twice, playing once with White and once with Black. Aside from Topalov ...

Weekend of Fun and Friends Between Battles on the Chess Board — The highlight of the year for many chess players is Washington’s Birthday weekend, when four amateur team championships are held across the country. There are no cash prizes, but the chess tournaments are popular because of the camaraderie. Players walk back and forth chatting before, after and even during the games. Some renew friendships with competitors they see only once a year. The World Amateur Team East tournament in Parsippany, N.J., the biggest and oldest of the chess events, celebrated its 40th birthday this year. There were 1,150 players and 271 teams, down from 283 teams last year, said Steve Doyle, the tournament’s director, who ...

Chess history, FIDE, USCF, Correspondence chess, Play computer chess, Chess computer, Chessbase

5/17 13:25