Two Totally Excellent Chess Videos

Chess Players are the Villains!

A friend of mine offered me several books this past week. I have a lot of books but there always seems to be room for more. So I took a look -- these were detective novels. Generally, I don't read a lot of detective stories although I admit to a great weakness for Stacy Keach's portrayal of TV detective Mike Hammer, and of course Sherlock Holmes. Nevertheless, I took one along for some potential summer reading.

Edgar Allen Poe is reputed to have written the first detective story in the modern genre with The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). Poe uses the chess motif in some of his works, but clearly with little technical expertise and not much liking. He referred to the game as "frivolous" and compared it unfavorably with checkers. It was Edgar Allen Poe who began the image of the chess aficionado as the nearly-machine-like semi-human villain with many schemes and few emotions.

The first Grandmaster of modern detective fiction would have to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing his famous Sherlock Holmes stories some fifty years after Poe's works. While Doyle's personal opinion of the game of chess is not known, he plays to his readers' prejudices and confines his chess references to his villains and scoundrels. In "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman" (around 1898), the title hero is an avid chess player who murders his chess partner. While Doyle uses the moves of the chess matches in the story to foreshadow the action in the story, Holmes also uses the chess games as a clue to solving the murders. Holmes declares that an interest in chess is "[a] mark, Watson, of a scheming mind."

One of the more technically proficient recountings of a game of chess in a detective novel was penned by Agatha Christie in The Big Four (1927). In this story, a chess master was murdered by a strong electrical shock dealt him in the third move of his Ruy Lopez opening. In anticipation of his opening, the electical connection was rigged to the square on the board through the floor from the apartment below. Unlike the other two stories mentioned here, Agatha Christie's chess player is the victim, not the scheming villain.

Ian Fleming portrays one of his villains in From Russia with Love (1957) as a Russian Grandmaster but the description of the actual chess play is nonsense and incidental to the story.

So it appears that chess players have a negative image in modern detective novels. Chess players are the villains, more often than otherwise. It remains curious to me that Sherlock Holmes was not portrayed as a chess player, given his penchant for logical thinking. Holmes remains a popular figure among chess players -- who apparently admire him more than he admired chess players.

This popular decorative chess set captures the characters of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle detective stories of the many adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is accompanied on his adventures by his faithful companion Doctor Watson, while the rest of the set features other leading characters from the famous stories including Mrs. Hudson and Inspector Lestrade, others. These carefully designed pieces are based on the original drawings that appeared in the Strand Magazine to accompany the Sherlock Holmes stories. Enhance your own reasoning skills through playing chess .... whenever a worthy opponent can be found. You will find this set on sale today at our website. Please purchase your set from www.ChessRight.com while this sale lasts!

Keep playing chess!

Army Chess Tournament 2009

The annual Army chess tournament was held in April 2009, and the inter-service chess tournament just concluded a week of competition as of May 9th. The winner is .... Specialist Jhonel Baniel of the Army Medical Department. Read more about it:

Military Chess Tournament

The NATO Chess Championships will be held in Hammelburg, Germany during June. Good luck to all the participants from all of us at www.ChessRight.com!

Tips for Buying the Right Chess Board

FINDING THE RIGHT SIZE CHESS BOARD

Many of the beautiful chess sets at www.ChessRight.com come without chess boards. While this gives you the opportunity to select a board that compliments your good taste, it also presents a challenge to get a board that fits your chess pieces. Sure, the boards with the smaller squares cost less. But if you get the board too small, it will be difficult to play as the pieces tend to get knocked over in the heat of battle when they are too close together. So it's always OK to round up a little to give your pieces room to play.

THE NUMBERY WAY:

There is a mathematical formula to compute the proper relationship between the size of your chess pieces and the size of the squares of the playing board that will best fit your needs. First, determine the diameter at the widest part of the chess pieces; usually this means measuring the base of the king.

This measurement should be 78% of the width of the squares of the board.

Or, to express it as an equation: W_k = .78 (W_sq) where W_k is the widest part of the chess king, and W_sq is the ideal width of the squares on the board.

For example, if the base of the king is 1.75 inches, which is a common size, you would enter 1.75 / .78 into your calculator and the resulting answer is 2.243 which rounds off to 2.25 inches.

THE REFERENCE TABLE:

For those of you whose calculator batteries are dead, here are a few of the more common sizes of base diameters and the corresponding square sizes.

King Base	Board square
1.5	2
1.75	2.25
2.0	2.5

THE SHORTCUT:

If your eyes start to glaze over at the first sign of mathematical calculations, and you aren’t organized enough to remember where you put this handy table, don’t despair. For most of the common sizes of chess pieces, there is a simple fix that is just for you! Yes, you still have to know the base diameter of the king. Then just add AT LEAST a half-inch and you will come out to the proper size of the squares for your chess board.

A WORD ABOUT LARGER PIECES

This process I have described works just fine on most standard size chess pieces, such as you might see in a tournament. When dealing with larger chess pieces, where the king stands 5 inches or taller, these formulas and short cuts may not yield the best results. The larger pieces usually come with manufacturer’s recommendations and often take the height as well as the width of the piece into account.

So come visit our store at www.ChessRight.com and take a look at the beautiful chess boards we have to offer. Many come in assorted sizes. So if you see something that you like but it’s not in the proper size, just give us a call. We may be able to help you buy the chess board that is just right for your game.

Keep playing chess!

www.ChessRight.com

Learn the Sicilian Defense in this 5 min video

Sicilian defense

Daylight Saving Time

March is here and Daylight Saving Time has arrived. It’s frequently albeit incorrectly called Daylight Savings Time, possibly because that may be somewhat easier to say. Besides, no daylight is actually saved by the adjustment of our clocks. The First Day of Spring is still a way off, but most of us have already set our clocks forward an hour. There are still some communities in the U.S. that don’t participate in this ritual each March.

Whenever someone mentions time to a chess fanatic, all thoughts turn to “clocks” and then to “Chess Clocks!” Chess Right Chess Store has an assortment of chess clocks (starting at $29.95) to help you find the chess clock just right for your game. Then, please take some time to look around our newly designed shop and check out our new merchandise.

Keep playing chess!

Benjamin Franklin and "the Turk"

In 1783, Benjamin Franklin received an invitation to play chess against a chess-playing machine called "the Turk." This supposed chess-playing machine was a life-size figure of a man seated in front of a chessboard, invented by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen who called it his "automaton." Although Benjamin Franklin knew that the technology was not available in those days for a truly automated chess-playing machine, nevertheless the illusion was so excellent that no one of the time could guess how the moves were communicated to the player inside (yes, there was a player inside), nor the mechanisms that made the arms move. In fact, it appears some extensive optical illusions were used to prevent the audience from seeing the player inside when "the Turk" was apparently opened for viewing.
We know that Benjamin Franklin accepted the invitation. Neither the specific moves nor the ultimate results of the game are reported in Franklin's letters (which suggests that he probably lost). "The Turk" defeated all but a few of the finest chess players of the time. However, we also know that Franklin enjoyed the game against his mechanized opponent immensely and took some interest into the workings of the automaton.
Today, there is no automated "Turk" to challenge us to a game of chess. There may be a niche for something like it at state fairs -- I remember my daughter playing checkers with Rudolph the Reindeer years ago at a fund-raiser for the local zoo. But we do have real automated chess-playing machines available to help us build our skills in chess, or to pass those times when we cannot find a worthy opponent.
Visit www.ChessRight.com to see our selection of the electronic chess games, starting at $57.00 plus shipping.


Keep playing chess!