A minor dispute.

A few days back Paul Leggett wrote the following, concerning the participation of several top GMs in the Qatar Masters Tournament:

I am firmly in the camp that believes the top player's ratings are inflated because they tend to avoid playing in Opens (Kramnik played in his first open in something like 20 years just within the last year [I believe it was at last year's edition of the Qatar Masters. - ed.]), and this is an example of what can happen when the top dogs move to the shallow end of the pool.

These results are rare, but when the opportunity is present, the top guys will get nicked enough (a draw is a rating loss) to keep rating at a more accurate level.

I meant to disagree (mildly) at the time, but forgot with all of the holiday hullabaloo. I do think the top players would probably get nicked sometimes, but I also think the top players are the top players because they really do perform that well. It hasn't been unknown for a player to soar to elite ratings status only to get knocked back down immediately upon getting into elite events.

Mostly, I think the top players would have to adjust to the style of an open Swiss tournament by learning to take more chances. This would increase their variance, but it would do so both ways, and ultimately I would expect them to end up in about the same positions on the ELO scale. As evidence, I give you the top five players, by rating, from Qatar, along with their results:

It turns out that the top three players in the world all gained ELO points, as did the twelfth ranked player. And the tenth ranked player, who had a disappointing tournament, only lost 1.8 ELO. Not bad! The eighth and tenth seeds did get hammered, ratings-wise, but they're both outside the top twenty in the world.

This is one tournament, and thus a painfully small sample size, but I think these results would hold up over time.

Thus endeth a minor disputation over a particular inconsequentiality.

Database reliability: A cautionary tale

Databases have revolutionized the game of chess. Thanks to these databases, people have access to millions of games, easily accessible and searchable. Contrast this to 1980, when I was but a lad of 12, living in the chess hinterlands of Orlando, Florida. I had exactly three books about the game: the then current edition of the USCF Rules of Chess, Harry Golombeck's Chess: A History, and Robert E. Burger's The Chess of Bobby Fischer.

The rule book was a rule book. Golombeck's book had all of 55 unannotated games. Burger's book, which was and is a gem, was something of a textbook, and had only a few complete games, though many positions from Fischer's games. (Now that my health has improved I plan on reviewing that book at some point, and I will explain then why I'm not linking to the book now.) But that was it. Probably fewer than 60 complete games, and I counted myself lucky! Books weren't as easy to come by, especially if you were a child and didn't have a USCF membership. These days anyone with an internet connection can access all manner of online databases for those millions of games mentioned earlier. And relatively cheap databases can be had for offline use. Astounding!

But these databases can have problems. Sometimes these collections haven't been checked well. In some sense, how could they be? Who could review millions of games for quality assurance? A few years back, I found the following game score in ChessBase's collection:

Starting with Black's 25th move, the game score becomes utter nonsense. For all I know this game score is still being used by ChessBase, though I sent them an email at the time. (Side note: An awful lot of the games between Petrosian and Tal were boring as dirt.)

The correct score can be found at ChessGames.com: LINK. That's where I found it then. You'll see that the last few moves of the game actually make sense! The prior score would only be believable if both players were so drunk they were wetting themselves at the board in their oblivion, and even that isn't believable. In that case neither would have resigned, and the most likely outcome would have been someone flagging after passing out.

So, the cautionary note is that you need to review the actual game scores in your database before taking them at face value. Trust no one! If you're a 1700 and find a bunch of stuff that you can determine is nonsense without even turning on a program, then you need to check the game score with another source!

Position of the Day: Christmas edition!

Another one for the "books beat databases" files! The book this time is John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book, which includes the following position which I cannot find in my database or in ChessGames.com online database: Kudriashov vs. I Ivanov, USSR 1979.

Kudriashov vs. I Ivanov, USSR 1979

Black to move

5rk1/PP4b1/3p2p1/3P4/1R2P2p/5pp1/4r3/R4NK1 b - - 0 1

Nunn calls the position "totally weird" and I'd be hard-pressed to disagree. I'll post the solution in a few days, but I've given the fen so you can plug it into a program if you like.

Game of the Day: 12/24/2015 edition

And now to look at some actual quality chess. Magnus Carlsen (FIDE 2834) faced Li Chao (2750) for the first time today. It was the first board of the fifth round of the Qatar Masters Open. Not many opens have an average FIDE rating of 2792 on the first board! (And we'll go higher in coming rounds, no doubt.) It was a "let's hand each other lit sticks of dynamite and see who goes BOOM first" kind of game. Carlsen played the currently popular 3 f3 line against Li's Grunfeld, and it went from there. I've only added a note about an amusing possibility on white's 28th move. If you want real annotations, look elsewhere! To that end, I recommend FM Mike Klein's article at ChessVibes both for annotations and post-game comments from Carlsen, as well as recaps of other action from the day. Here's the Carlsen-Li game.

Dumpster Diving: 12/24/2015 edition

Playing a three minute game online on Christmas Eve, waiting for my turn to wrap presents, I came up with the following. I missed a few things here and there, but it has a pleasant finish.

Position of the Day: 12/23/2015 edition

And I'll conclude with something a bit more upbeat. Down the boards today Norwegian IM Johan-Seabstian Christiansen (FIDE 2385) played against German GM Stefan Bromberger (2521). I'll confess that I don't believe I've heard of either of these players before. A rather crazy game ensued (which I'll embed below), but the most amazing thing is this position from near the end of the game:

Christiansen - Bromberger, Qatar Masters Open

Position after 29...Q8d3+

White resigned in light of 30 Bf3 Q3xf3+ 31 gxf3 Qxf3# and 30 Bxd3 Qxd3+ 31Kf4 Qe3#.

Gruesome, isn't it?

Goat of the Day

More games from the Qatar Masters Open, with an eye towards finding the goat of the day.

In the runner-up position, we have the young Chinese star Wei Yi (FIDE 2730). After a fairly blunder filled game (at least according to Stockfish), Wei reached the following position as White against the Indian IM Vignesh (2422):

White to move

White is a pawn to the good, and Black has weaknesses, but White's king isn't too secure either, the presence of queens means that White MUST keep up the home guard, and the rook ending would probably be difficult to win if the queens come off (at least according to Svidler and Ramirez).

Grandmaster Instruction

Mark Crowther, of The Week In Chess fame, has been stating on Twitter that the last couple of years he felt like his understanding of the game has improved simply by watching top grandmasters go over their games in press conferences after rounds. I sympathize with this point of view, although it is hard to know exactly how much understanding translates into improved play, much less improved results. (If everyone you play is getting better at the same rate you are, you might not see any improvement at all!)

For example, I found it helpful to watch Vladimir Kramnik (yes, my favorite player) go over his game today. Kramnik is very fast and spews lots of lines (you can see Svidler struggling to keep up at times), but it is interesting to see what he's looking at, both positionally and tactically. Today he took on Naroditsky. The commentary is below, for those interested.

[I'm having trouble getting the video to embed. The link is below. The clip with Kramnik should be the second clip on the page.]

LINK

Coverage courtesy of Chess24.com & Livestream.com.

Note that Livestream classifies this as Sports/Extreme Sports! I had no idea an ironing board was involved....

Clermont Chess Club December Unrated G15 Tournament Results

We've taken to running unrated tournaments on the first Thursday of every month. For the month of December we ran a G15 tournament with the unusual pairing method of 1 vs 2, 3 vs 4, etc in the first round, and similarly in subsequent rounds. This is Rule Variation 29L1 in the USCF Official Rules of Chess, as discussed here in this earlier post by Paul.

Anyhow, the results are below. As the winner I think I played one good game, one adequate game, and one poor game that I won by luck. Unfortunately, I didn't write down any of my moves. Also unfortunately, I was coming down with a nasty lung infection which left me completely zombified for several days thereafter, so now if I fail to win in the future I can't use the excuse that I was sick, because I was sicker than I realized this time. So much for that excuse in the future!

Still it was fun. I'm not sure we've got an adequate sample size yet to opine on Rule Variation 29L1, but the results seem promising. At the very least everyone know coming out of the gate they'll get at least one game against a similarly rated opponent, and after that it's up to the player.

Note that the tournament is unrated, so the rating changes at the end will not actually occur.

Escape of the Day: Vladimir Kramnik

Arab oil money can make strange things happen. A strange thing in the chess world is seeing several players in the Top Ten, including the top three on the live rating list, play in an open event.

In round one, no less a player than Magnus Carlsen got tagged for a half point against a woman International Master rated almost 350 points lower rated than Magnus. (This Swiss Gambit has worked out well for Magnus, as he still hasn't faced anyone within 300 Elo of his own illustrious rating. Kramnik & Giri, amongst others, haven't had such an easy time of it.) Yesterday, Kramnik got nicked for a half-point, albeit against a member of the 2600 club, one Kacper Piorun. But today Kramnik almost gave up a full point to the 2596 rated Daniele Vocaturo.

Up through the first 20 moves or so, Kramnik appeared to have everything under control. But on move 21 Big Bad Vlad started transforming the pawn formation and by the time the queens came off on move 28, his position was looking bad, with one weak pawn after another.

Kramnik shed his queenside pawns for activity, but by the time control at move 40 he was down three pawns, although White was destined to lose at least one of them.

But as I like to repeat, ad infinitum ad naseum, KEEP FIGHTING! And as the commentators Peter Svidler and Alejandro Ramirez pointed out, all three resulted were possible around move 43, as White's king was running out of space, and could find himself checkmated if White got careless. And within a few moves, Vocaturo had allowed Kramnik to repeat the position and Kramnik got his draw.

This game would probably also make for a decent exercise in looking for "Trends, Turning Points and Emotional Shifts" as Alex Yermolinsky wrote about in his book The Road to Chess Improvement - at least three inflection points occurred in this one! The full game is below.

The "Grand Chess Tour" is a joke.

I've tried to write this post a couple of times now. The topic just makes me too angry for coherence. The Grand Chess Tour, consists of the Stavangar Tournament in Norway, the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, and the London Chess Classic (not in Ohio). Players accumulate points in the overall standings based on their performances in the individual tournaments.

After the final tournament, concluded a week ago, Magnus Carlsen was declared the winner of both the London leg and the Tour as a whole. This last was due entirely to the most asinine tie-breaks ever used in the history of Chess. (Yes, I am including the time a Roulette wheel was used to settle the outcome of a Candidates Match between Huebner and Smyslov.) You can read about that The Chess Mind, in the perfectly named post Grand Chess Tour Tiebreaks: A System Than Which None Lesser Can Be Conceived.

The upshot is this: Despite only finishing on +1 for the tour, Carlsen finished first  in the overall standings, ahead of Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (+2), Hikaru Nakamure (+3) and Anish Giri (+5). To add to the absurdity, Carlsen finished behind or tied with Giri and MVL in all three stages of the tour, yet still finished ahead of them in the standings! (Call Magnus the Tortoise of Chess.)

MVL really got hosed more than once, though. As recounted elsewhere, despite beating Giri in a tiebreak, he actually finished behind Giri in London. All these tiebreak shenanigans resulted in MVL missing out on qualifying for next year's Grand Chess Tour. So, not only does he get lesser prizes than deserved this year, he will miss out on next year's Tour as well, meaning he will miss three of the best (and most lucrative) tournaments of the year, plus whatever money he might have won for his placement in the tour next year. 

This is an egregious ... hmm, how to put this without using foul language? This is an egregious mistreatment of a player for playing well. But the Grand Chess Tour had already set a precedent for this when they didn't invite Karjakin this year, despite Karjakin having won the first two editions of the Stavangar Tournament ahead of Magnus Carlsen. So at least the GCT is consistent!

What a joke.

Hero of the Day: IM Nino Batsiashvili

Today, IM Nino Batsiashvili (FIDE ELO 2498) drew as black against World Champion Magnus Carlsen (FIDE ELO 2834) in the First Round of the Qatar Masters Open. As typical, Magnus played the game to the bitter end, finally conceding the draw in the position below:

Screencap from Chess24.com

Congratulations to Ms. Batsiashvili, who is having a great year, professionally. I'm sure Maxime Vachier-Lagrave will be sending you a very expensive present soonest!

I'm also sure that somehow Magnus will still manage to win the tournament on tie-breaks after finishing on 50%. That's just how the organizers roll these days.

A non-chess post.

So I see that the early reviews of the new movie are starting to come out. (I don't really need to say which movie, do I?) The consensus seems to be that it is the best installment in the franchise in 32 years.

That is damning with the faintest possible praise.

Recommended

Paul (I think) pointed out this nice article on the exotic topic of how to read a chess book. Oddly enough, it's entitled:

How to Read a Chess Book

Speed Chess Maxim

A well-played game of speed chess deserves to be lost.

Blog Roll additions

Chess Improver Blog by Nigel Davies & co.

Kingpin Magazine, Edited & Published by Jonathan Manley, dedicated to chess satire, when possible.

When is a child too young for chess?

An excellent article.

Too Young for Chess

by Hugh Patterson

Another example of the need to fight to the bitter end

Dennis Monokroussos (can you tell he's a favorite chess writer of mine?) is now writing a column for a site called World Chess. His most recent column features a brilliant, if flawed, game between two obscure Dutch amateurs from the 1930s. In it, the player of the white pieces (Chris de Ronde) goes for a wild attacking idea while in deep time trouble. His opponent (Hendrik Kamstra) goes wrong in the complications, which isn't surprising given the difficulty of the game.

Read all about it there.

Comments, reviews, serendipity, and a complete anecdote!

One problem with running the blog is that I'm using g-mail for the attached email account, and for some reason I've had trouble getting g-mail accounts to work with Outlook. And since I don't check my g-mail account that often, I can miss comments on older posts.

Seirawan Chess

We've discussed chess variants at the club recently. One of the newer ones is called Seirawan Chess. It features two new pieces: the hawk and the elephant. The hawk has the combined powers of a knight and a bishop. The elephant has the combined powers of a knight and a rook. The new pieces are not on the board at the start of the game. Instead, whenever a piece moves from its initial square, either the elephant or the hawk can be placed on the vacated square. If either piece has not been placed by the time the other eight have all moved, it may not enter the game. Pawns can be promoted to either of the new pieces.

This variant is also called SHARPER Chess, as it was developed jointly by Yasser Seirawan and Bruce Harper, but Seirawan Chess seems to be sticking as a name because, let's face it, Yaz's name has more marketing power.

It should also be noted that House of Staunton sells the extra pieces, though they describe the pieces as having different moves than do Seirawan & Harper.

Anyhow, the link to Seirawan Chess above has a section on endgames that shows the powers of the new pieces (against c- & f- pawns, for example, the elephant is better than a queen in certain simple positions), and Yasser has also done an introductory video that can be seen on YouTube.

If anyone wants to give this a try at the club some time, let me know. I figure we can use pieces from another set to distinguish the hawks and elephants.

Recommended: New In Chess

New In Chess magazine is the best chess magazine in the world. I'm sure there are other good magazines, and there have been other good magazines in the past. (For example, I loved Yasser Seirawan's Inside Chess magazine, which was fantastic, especially its early incarnation as a bi-weekly.) But NIC is in a class by itself. The production values are outstanding, the content is incredible, and if you're a reasonably strong club player almost every page in the magazine has something worthy of note. The only downsides are that it is somehat expensive and comes out only 8 times a year, but personally I think the pluses outweigh those concerns.

I'd go into more detail, but I want to keep this short, especially since most people have probably seen a copy at some point. And the point is the same no matter the length: New In Chess magazine is an incredible product.

Move of the Day: June 17, 1974 edition

Way back when during the Nice, 1974 Olympiad, the Soviets faced the West German team on June 17th. On the first board, Anatoly Karpov, the then current wunderkind of the Soviet Chess Machine, faced off as White against long time West German Number 1 Wolfgang Unzicker. A typical slow Closed Ruy Lopez followed. Eventually, the following position was reached:

Karpov vs Unzicker

After 23...Qd8

I discovered this position in the 2015/6 issue of New In Chess. Parimarjan Negi wrote about it in his column Parimarjan's Chess Gym. I'll turn it over to him:

A well-known position. Black is ready to exchange rooks along the a-file, after which it will be much harder for White to generate anything on the queenside. Here Karpov played the amazing:

24. Ba7!

This absolutely paralyzes Black's queenside. The rest of the game is elementary technique, as White brought his other rook to the queenside, seemingly with the intention of penetrating via the a-file, but ending up completely suffocating Black, who was keeping himself ready for the bishop retreat that never happened.

An awkward seeming move, but a pretty idea! The rest of the game is a slow, steady squeeze. The whole game is in the viewer below.

Good advice, and not just for children!

From ChessKid.com, advice on what a player should review before every move - threats from the opponent!

Checks, Captures, Queen Attacks!

Checks! Every move you should be looking for your opponent's threats. What more important threat is there to look for then a possible check against your king? After all, any check you miss might be checkmate! [I missed a mate in one just the other night. - TD]

...

Captures! Certainly the second most important thing to look for every move is a capture(s). If you miss a threat for your opponent to take one of your pieces, especially if its for free, you will be in big trouble . So stay focused!

...

Queen Attacks! For our third and final piece of advice on how to "avoid blundering (which means missing something BIG)" and build "Prophylactic Thinking", we are going to discuss Queen Attacks.

The reason looking for threats on your queen is the third most important thing to do is simple: she (the queen) is the most powerful piece on the board!

 Read the rest there. 

Dumpster Diving

I've played tens of thousands of games of chess on the internet, perhaps hundreds of thousands. For the most part the games are even worse than my real life games, but occasionally something entertaining pops up. Below, for your pleasure and/or ridicule, is such a game. I played my usual Catalan-style opening mess, and things got entertaining. Handles have been changed to protect the guilty.

For a game in three minutes I'm fairly happy with it, from an entertainment standpoint.

BONUS: Position of the day material!

Analysis

Position after 27 Nd6

Anish Giri: Trash-talker extraordinaire!

 On Twitter a few days ago, Tarjei Svenson pointed out a probable typo in New In Chess:

Carlsen was 6 years old, I doubt it was in 1996, Loek! @NewInChess pic.twitter.com/tkHfWijCap

— Tarjei J. Svensen (@TarjeiJS) November 7, 2015

Giri replied with:

.@TarjeiJS @NewInChess I noticed it, but found nothing strange with @MagnusCarlsen 6, mating Loeky in a sicilian.

— Anish Giri (@anishgiri) November 7, 2015

In the words of the Powerpuff Girls, "HARD CORE!"

Faster it is.

I posted a link to Greg Shahade's call for faster time controls the other day. Looks like he'll get his wish, at least for one top tournament. The Zurich Chess Challenge in early 2016 will feature a "time control of 40 minutes per game with additional 10 seconds for each move," per their web site. The six participants will be Viswanathan Anand, Levon Aronian, Anish Giri, Vladimir Kramnik, Hikaru Nakamura, and Alexei Shirov. You can read more about it there.

h/t Chess24.com

Test Time

From the Giri-So blitz tiebreaker at the Bilbao VIII Chess Masters Final. Assess the position.

Giri vs So

White to move after 38...Nxe1

Assessment will be added in a few days.

Attica! Attica!

The other day I posted the game Morozevich vs Vachier-Lagrave, Biel 2009. That game featured a rook trapped in prison behind its own pawns and king. Today I was looking at New In Chess 6/2015 and saw a new composition that Timman has just published. This problem also features a trapped piece, and it seems that freeing that piece is the key to winning the game.

Timman 2015 (after Simkhovitch)

White to play and win

4q3/4P3/4P3/4k1p1/p3BbP1/PpP2P2/1P6/QK3R2 w - - 0 1

Solution below.

A call for faster games!

From Greg Shahade, Slow Chess should die a fast death. 

Slow chess should disappear and be replaced by rapid chess. Rapid chess should not be rapid chess, it should be chess. What should the standard time control be? Something like 30+5 second increment sounds perfect to me. And when I suggest 30+5, please note that I’m choosing a time control this slow only to appease the masses. I think 15+5 is more appropriate.

Why is slow chess so horrible? There are so so many reasons. But the main one is the simplest:

People don’t like to play slow chess!

Now wait you might tell me, “I really do love to play slow chess, and so do all of my friends”.

I have an answer for you: “No you don’t”.

The main thing Shahade misses is that slower time controls DO allow for players to get deeper into the positions. We've seen that at our club. We can get interesting games in 15 minute games, but there's a limit to how well we can explore them. Heck, sometimes we can tear into one of those games afterwards and spend an hour going over it! How much better would the game be if that kind of time were spent during the game?

And watching some of you in tournaments recently I can definitively state that longer games allow some of you to get much deeper into a position. Here I'm thinking of Jim McTigue in particular, as with his recent game against Lauren Kleidermacher, but it applies to others as well.

Ultimately, the market has spoken on this front, both at the top level and down at our modest levels - people like slow games for tournaments. There are any number of chances to play at more rapid time controls, both in tournaments and in clubs. I don't think Alex Zelner's rapid tournaments do any better than he game 90 tournaments attendance-wise, at least not when I was regularly playing in them. So I don't think we need to get rid of the slower time controls just yet.

An interesting interview with Svidler & Karjakin

Peter Svidler and Sergey Karjakin have given an interview to 64, the Russian chess & draughts magazine, about their match in the finals of the recent World Cup. Vladimir Barsky conducted the interviews and Chess24.com has provided a translation of the first part of the article. If you're interested in current events, this is a worthwhile read.

Fun with Amazon

I just noticed on Amazon that Mark Dvoretsky's new book, Recognizing Your Opponent's Resources: Developing Preventive Thinking, is listed in the Humor & Entertainment section of the Kindle Store. Somehow that seems wrong!

Great Book Deals

Paul has noticed that chess books go on sale, sometimes briefly, for great prices on Amazon.com. Here are some recent examples he pointed out on the club's Facebook page.

The Diamond Dutch: Strategic Ideas & Powerful Weapons Paperback 2014 

by Viktor Moskalenko         $7.95

Tarrasch Defence: Move by Move (Everyman Chess Series) Paperback – 2014

by Sam Collins       $10.03

Sabotage the Grunfeld!: A Cutting-edge Repertoire for White based on 3.f3 Paperback – 2014

by Larry Kaufmann       $4.20

Korchnoi: Move by Move Paperback – 2014

by Cyrus Lakdawala         $4.33

Those are the prices for NEW books, not used books. Not bad! 

(And yes, I know the formatting above is bad, but Blogger is being difficult about it.)

"It's the strangest thing," said the man with an icepick sticking out of the back of his skull....

Since I started playing real live chess over the board again, I have completely lost the ability to play chess online. My rating has plummeted a good 250 points, and would drop even lower if I played more. I have no explanation for this.

Incomplete Anecdote Alert!

In my previous post I wanted to insert a reference to an old anecdote. Upon seeing a certain move, a certain grandmaster states, "I'd rather resign than play such a move!" This anecdote was to be referenced in this line:

Pace , I can imagine certain players would rather resign the game than play such a move!

Only I forgot to put in the grandmaster's name after "pace". Whoops.

There was a reason for that, though. I couldn't quite remember which grandmaster had said in in relation to which move. (I'm sure it's been said many times by many players, but I've got a certain example in mind. It's somewhere in my books, but I can't remember which one. GRRR.

I thought it was a comment by Pachman concerning a move in the game Portish-Kavalek, Wijk aan Zee 1975, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Maybe it was Bent Larsen discussing the Breyer Variation of the Ruy Lopez? No, that isn't it either. And now I've got no idea.

It sounds like an anecdote that Kavalek would have told, so maybe it's somewhere else in the tournament book for the 1975 Wijk aan Zee tournament. Or perhaps it is in one of Speelman's books? I've got no idea. It also has the vague ring of either Korchnoi or Botvinnik about it. A web search hasn't helped. This is going to drive me nuts until I remember it.

UPDATE: In the comments Paul Leggett supplies the answer! More detail (excruciating detail) can be found here.

Your Moves for the Day: h7-is-a-great-square-to-sack-a-piece Edition

Two moves today, both of which offer a standard motif, but with a catch! From the insanely complicated game Alexander Morozevich vs. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Biel 2009.

A Wild Game from Bilbao

We have yet another tournament featuring top players in progress. This time it's the VIII Grand Slam Masters Final in Bilbao, Spain. In a game featuring World #10 vs World #9, Wesley So won a wild game against the Chinese player Ding Liren. I'm not going to pretend to understand what all was going on. Anyone interested can find notes all over the web, I'm sure. But here's the game, for those interested.

And here is an extremely well-timed photo of the critical moment, from my favorite chess photographer, David Llada.

Notice on Future Events at the Club

From David H. Raymond:

Here is a true history of a discussion about adding some structure to our club [Clermont Chess Club].  This discussion occurred at our meeting Thursday 10/22/15.  This is a rewritten history to enhance it & make it more accurate (as I believe it should be vs as it was).

The 1st Thursday of each even numbered month, beginning 12/3/2015, there will be a tournament abbreviated FTZ: 1st Thursday Zephyr.  3 rounds,  game in 15 min with 5 sec delay.  Not rated.  29L1 pairings, which is Swiss System except that within each score group #1 plays #2, #3 plays #4, . . .

The 1st Thursday of each odd numbered month, beginning with a team match 11/5/2015, there will be an odd event occasioning much interest & merriment.  Ideas include but are not limited to team encounters, blitz play, tournaments in which everyone is required to play a specified opening, handicap play, Fischer Random, deployment chess, . . .

Every March-April, beginning 2016, there will be a club championship.  4 rounds, 1 every 2 weeks.  Game in 90 min with 5 sec delay.  Not rated.  Regular Swiss System pairings.   

[Note from Todd Durham: I LOVE the idea of Fischer Random tournaments!]