This will be a short post, but I have to share it with you. I just found the fantastic page http://www.ficsgames.com/, where your FICS (Free Internet Chess Site AKA freechess.org) are stored.

You can save them or re-play them. You can also search for games by players, ratings, variants, ECO code of the opening, date. Or you can study the history of games of a player there.

Very nice and useful site. And thanks to Nezha – the author of http://mrnezhmetdinov.blogspot.com/, where I found the link to the site.

P.S. If you don’t know what FICS is, read my post Where to play chess online – part II. FICS (Freechess.org)

Black is already better, but will you find the ultimate stroke?

Black to move:

A few weeks ago I wrote here about Ruy Lopez with 6.Qe2 and Marshall-like antidote line. At the end of the article I mentioned the thematic tournament of chess engines in this variant.

I have “organized” and I would like to share its results and games played in the tournament with you now. I hope you could find them interesting for your own chess evolution if you play Ruy Lopez.

In fact there were two tournaments. Each of them with a bit different “participants” – chess engines. Both tournaments were blitz ones. It could distort the results of some games at their last stage, but the purpose of the tournaments were to find whether black’s idea is viable. And it seems like it is, because…

The final score of two tournaments was +35, =10, -41!

Here are the tables:

Here you can download the games from these tournaments in pgn format:
Ruy Lopez 6.Qe2 – tournament 1
Ruy Lopez 6.Qe2 – tournament 2

Would you find the best way for the white to win the game?

White to move:

Yesterday I played the first round of the tournament in our club. We will play one round per week, so this tournament will end up in the middle of December as we are a group of 14 players.

It will not be an easy tournament for me as the opponents are quite strong and my start rank is #10. But I like tournaments like this because it gives me the opportunity to play with a bit stronger players and learn something from them.

The first game was quite interesting (maybe “dramatic for the players” is the more suitable collocation), but full of mistakes. At first I acquired an advantage, but then I lost it and even was afraiding about the game. Happily I found a good way to exchanges of pieces and to the draw ending.

Here is a fragment from the game. Would you find black’s move after 12.Qd2?

Hopefully, the quality of my game will be higher in next games.