Javier

The Royal Dutch Chess Federations has developed in cooperation with MSD Software B.V. De KNSB a Windows version of the famous Swiss Master DOS. This program 'Swiss Master 5.0' is for customers not from the Netherlands for sale for the price of € 50,- . The prise is based on development and maintenance costs. Here's the link: http://www.schaakbond.nl/

Swiss Perfect's programmer has been working for several months on a new product called "Leaguewatch", which can be used for chess competitions or any other sport. You can download the Beta version from the following site: http://www.leaguewatch.com

Thanks Michel, that's very kind of you. I have visited your site and it does look very interesting indeed!

Apparently, this position was shown to Kasparov and it took him many long minutes to work out the solution. The position is reached after black's 4th move. It can be done in 3 moves or 5, that's easy, but how do you reach the position after black's 4th move? that's a little harder! Good luck! By the way, if you know the answer, don't post it, just say that you do and let others think about it for a while.

Is your database too small? Here's a link (completely legal!) where you can download hundreds of thousands of games, organized by opening code: This is the link

You need a VERY fast conection and lots of free space in your hard disk, but if you do, you can download them for free here. A tablebase is basically a "bookfile" which makes chessprograms and databases play perfect endgames, but this only applies to positions with very few pieces on the board, like R vs P, B vs P, R+1 P vs R+P, etc. This is the link

Can't afford Chessbase? Chess assistant? Then maybe you should take a look at SCID, a chess database application for Windows and Linux operating systems. The current version is 3.6, and you can get it here.

ISBN: 0-7134-7828-4 Date of publication: 1998 Editor: Batsford Pages: 320 Language: English This book was a surprise to me. It's made of 109 annotated games which have been distributed in 15 chapters. (The book has 320 pages, which might give you a hint about the depth of the analysis) Although there are many subvariaitons and links to other games, what makes this book special is the assessment of the positions and the very honest comments made by the authors, which often make things a lot easier to follow. I didn't get the feeling that "superfluous" material has been added. A bible for players interested in this variation.

White has just played 1.e4. On the 5th move, black plays 5...Nxh1 checkmate. What was the game?

White has just played 1.a3. On the fifth move, white gives checkmate... ¡with a rook! what was the game?

This position was reached after black's 5th move. What was the game?

I'm aware that some users might be a little upset abut the new changes at our site's forums. Unfortunately, the old ones ran into a problem which simply couldn't be solved as the software was no longer being developed. So, what's new in the new forums? The most outstanding feature is probably an internal board which can be used to include variations, like this: (this can take a little time to load, be patient)