Since our last blog, my “email box” has been flooded with notices about various tournaments that will be held in the month of December. If you’re looking to play in a large event, you might want to pick from one of the following:

Atlantic City International

This event will have a $50,000 prize fund (based on 500 entries) and will be held in Atlantic City, NJ from 12/17 to 12/19. This is a 10 round tournament with an entry fee is $149. The big news for this tournament is that Gata Kamsky will be one of the players. He is also going to play a simul on the Thursday before the tournament starts. For more information visit www.chessweekend.com.

Empire City Open

If you’d prefer to stay a little closer to home, the Empire City Open will be held at The New Yorker Hotel from 12/26 to 12/28. This tournament has $10,000 in guaranteed prizes and a $98 entry fee for a 6 Round Swiss. To learn more, visit www.chesstour.com

Eastern Open

If you have plans to be in our nation’s capitol after the Christmas holiday, you can participate in the Eastern Open, which is being held from 12/27 to 12/30. This tournament will be an 8 Round Swiss with an entry fee of $100 to $125 depending on what section you play in. The prize fund will be $17,500 and GM Alex Lenderman will be giving a free lecture on 12/27 at 10:30 a.m. Additional information is available at www.easternopenchess.com

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One of the most quoted sections of the book notes that successful musicians, artists, businessman, and others who excel in their fields have one thing in common. They have spent 10,000 or more hours honing their craft. This can be confirmed by looking at the biographies of many of the world’s great chess players. While most of us are lucky to carve out an hour or two on a good day to do a little studying on the latest theory, avid players are working at it five or more hours each and every day.

In the world of music, it’s a little known fact that the Beatles were not a highly regarded band during their early days in Liverpool.

But, from 1960 – 1962, they were given the opportunity to go to Hamburg, Germany and play in various nightclubs. In 1960, they stayed in Hamburg for four months and played seven days a week. Their schedule at the Indra Club

required them to play four hours per night on weekdays and six hours per night on weekends.

So, ultimately, talent may be important, but without a lot of hard work, it’s almost impossible to improve and reach your true potential.

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The data proves that we are indeed becoming a much stronger club. Not only are we attracting more players per event, but the average rating per player has risen dramatically. The 2007 Ides of March Swiss drew a field of 17 players with an average rating of 1596. The recently completed 90 Minute Mayhem tournament had 23 players with an average rating of 1848, fully 250 points higher than just a few years ago.

The other interesting fact is that many of our long time members have also been improving their games along the way. A number of members have been playing in events all around the tri-state area such as the annual Amateur East, as well as events at the Marshall and other local clubs such as the ICA and Bergen Chess Mates.

We can all be proud that our efforts to spread the word have been successful. If you’re reading this blog for the first time, be sure to tell your friends to come on out to Suffern to enjoy a good challenge.

In fact, as detailed in Edward Winter’s chess base article (link) the Chess section of the Guiness Book of World Records has become smaller and smaller over the years. In the article, he notes that in 1988 there were only 70 lines of text across 2 pages devoted to chess trivia. By 2007 there were only 2 entries having to do with chess, however there was plenty of space for oddball records such as “fastest carrot chopping” and the world’s “largest underpants”.

After doing a little research, we were able to uncover a few tidbits from Edward’s column and from Wikipedia’s article on Chess World Records (Wikipedia link). Some notable entries include:

1. Longest Analysis: Garry Kasparov was the co-author of the book “Kasparov Against the World” which devotes 202 pages to the analysis of a single game.
2. Slowest Correspondence Game: The ChessBase link above contains the complete transcript of a postal game between Karl Brenzinger and Francis Eugene Brenzinger that went on for 16 years. Apparently white blunders on move 46 due to impatience after waiting 7 months for Black’s 45th move!
3. Longest Tournament Game: Per Wikipedia, the tournament game with the most moves occurred in 1989 between Nikolic and Arsovic. The game lasted 269 moves with a total time of 20 hours and 15 minutes. The game eventually ended in a draw. One reason for the length of the game was that FIDE had a special rule which required 100 moves (instead of 50) without a capture for endings involving Rook and Bishop vs. Rook. (Thankfully, that rule has since been modified).
4. Longest Streak Without a Loss: Michael Tal went a full year – an incredible 95 tournament games without a loss from October 1973 to October 1974. Over that time period he amassed a record of 46 wins and 49 draws.

Wyoming

According to the December 2009 rating supplement, only 2 players in the USCF are rated in the state!  Shawn Svare is listed as the high person on the totem pole with a rating of 1619.  Upon further investigation, I learned that Shawn’s membership expired in November of 2009, so that would leave only one rated player left in the state.

Somehow this doesn’t ring true.  Upon further investigation we learned that http://www.wyomingchess.com/ is the official site of the Wyoming Chess Association and the Cheyenne Chess Club.  The club meets on Monday and Thursday nights from 7 to 10 pm and attracts some cross border players from nearby Colorado.

That said, Cheyenne is not a major metropolis, but it is the largest city in the state of Wyoming with a population of 53,000!

Connecticut

The nearby state of Connecticut is only credited with 166 players in the same ratings supplement noted above.  Unlike Wyoming, there are a number of strong players in the state.  In fact, Sergey Kudrin, rated 2579 is ranked 27th on the current USCF rating list.

A quick look at his recent results shows that he tied for 1st place in the Philadelphia Open this year.  His score of 7.0 points in 9 rounds is impressive, considering that he only played in 7 rounds (with 2 byes) and had a record of 5-0-2.  Each of the other three players with 7 points did not have any byes.

The following match from Chessgames.com shows a draw engineered vs. Joel Benjamin’s English Opening:  http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1026422

So, I found out that there are 21,535 active members and that most of them come from a handful of states.  And of course NY has the most chess players, right?  To my surprise, I found out that TX has the most chess players!  But I was correct in guessing that most players come from a few states.  In fact, 48% of chess players come from just 5 states (which means 52% are in the remaining 45 states).

So what does this mean?  To be honest, I don’t know! 

I do feel that we are lucky to live in the Northeast where it is pretty easy to find a local club and you can play in a multiple tournaments in any given week.  To let you know how lucky you are, I did some research on chess in other states in the union.  For this article, we’ll take a peek at chess in HI and ND.  In the coming weeks, I’ll add new articles on other chess in other parts of the country.

Chess in Hawaii

Believe it or not, according to the December ratings supplement, there are only 11 rated players in Hawaii.  I found this hard to believe, so I looked up some local clubs and found that there are a handful of clubs in the area (across all of the islands).  Tournament results show that there are two top players out there – Corneliu Rubsamen and Robert Lau.

Robert Lau is a 9th grader with a master level rating of 2266.  Back in 2007, he won a gold medal in the North American Youth Championships in Aguascalientes, Mexico in the under 16 division.  He recently won the state championship, although for some reason, he did not face Corneliu in any of the rounds.

Corneilu Rubsamen is the head instructor at the Mililani Chess Club, located 17 miles Northwest of Honolulu.  He also has a master rating of 2263 and has a number of games featured in the database of chessgames.com.  Based on the games I reviewed, he is a fan of the Scotch Game and has had some success with it.  The link below shows one of his games in the 2007 Hawaii Open in which he shreds the Sicillian Defence of his opponent.     http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1390252

Chess in North Dakota

You’d probably be surprised to find there are any players in North Dakota at all, but there are – 19 of them to be exact.  The top player in the ratings supplement is Mike Sailer – a 16 time North Dakota chess champion who likes to play in the North Dakota “Chessnuts” club.  http://www.ndchessnut.com

The best part of this story is that the club meets at the downtown Fargo Subway restaurant!  They play on Friday nights from 8 pm to midnight and all ratings are based on Game 15 matches. 

So the next time you feel that your chess options are limited and that you can’t find friends, relatives, or neighbors who understand your passion for the game – remember it could be worse.  You could be living in North Dakota (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!!

We also have added a new chess store “The Chess Zone” which is a local Haverstraw business that offers a wide variety of resonably priced merchandise on their website.  They are also the source of the new joke which was posted to the site today.

Lastly, we’d like to congratulate Roger Pedersen on having one of his games from the 2009 World Senior Amateur tournament featured in the Star-Ledger in the Chessmate column.  If anybody can find the link to this article (believe me, I tried) we would be happy to post it.

   

However it is also entertaining to learn that there are many celebrities out there who are also fascinated with the game.  In this post we will explore two examples, Humphrey Bogart and Howard Stern!

Humphrey Bogart was a lifelong chess enthusiast who used to hustle people for dimes and quarters in New York City parks and at Coney Island.  He insisted that a scene with him playing chess should be included in Casablanca.  Off screen, he was a certified USCF tournament director and actively participated in the Hollywood Chess Club.  He was supposedly a very strong player, probably expert class and was able to draw 6 time US Champ, GM Samuel Reshevesky during a simul.

The game below, which can be found in its entirety with some other transcripts of his games on www.chessgames.com is a contest between him and his wife Lauren Bacall.  The game starts off as a Ruy Lopez, then moves out of the book … 

and now tactics come into play after … Bf2! 5. Kf2 Ne4  6. Kf3 Qh4  7. g4 f5 8. gf Rf8  9. Ke3 Rf5  10. Nf3 Qf4  11. Kd3 Nf2 and white resigns.

Stay tuned for future articles on famous chess players.  If you are hungry for more, go to the Fun Stuff / Trivia page for a quiz on other chess playing celebrities.