Topalov - Kamsky cartoons

Today the match between Kamsky and Topalov ended with the victory of the latter in the 7th game. The overall result was 4.5 - 2.5 for Topalov. We already brought the logo of the event to Chess Images.

Extensive coverage may be found on the usual blogs and webpages. We keep refering to chess pictures.

These caricatures were made for the Sofia 2007 tournament. The players do not look handsome and Topalov's nose seems way too big.

Chess: war on war

During the last war in the former Yugoslavia, two men play chess on top of a blue car.

Chess is a very good metaphor of the war and this is a very good photograph by Roger Richards DVreporter.com

This is Spartaaaa!!!!!!!!!!

I have seen this one in several places and I love it.

It seems to be a reference to the 300 Spartans who fought the Persians of Xerxes in the Battle of Thermopylae.
They are now a very well-known story in terms of pop-cluture, thanks to a comic and a 2007 film.

The battlefield here is a 16x16 chessboard (that is 256 squares, or 4 conventional chessboards) in which our 300 Greeks [White] are represented by quite standart material in terms of Rooks, Knights and Bishop (2 of each class), 10 Pawns, 2 Queens, and 3 Kings (one of them a human head, shouting).

The Persian side [Black] is composed by eight ranks of soldiers. When you add the material that gives you 64 Pawns, 16 Rooks, 16 Bishops, 16 Knights, 8 Quuens and 8 Kings. A total 128 chess pieces.

But you know the beauty in chess resides in victory of the spirit over the material. A very appropiate metaphor.

Two Knights against a Pawn.

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A nice diagram that helps to understand a quite difficult ending.

It is quite well known that two Knights cannot defeat a bare King. It would be possible, should the weak side play terribly (there are mate positions indeed, but they are always avoidable).

All of this may change if the weak side has a single pawn. Then, the strong side (in our diagram, the White) can force a stalemate position with one Knight plus the King and then, ride the other Knight to the checkmate while the weak side moves its sad pawn.

I find it difficult to force the opposite King into the corner with only one Knight and the eventual support of the other, but it can be done. It has been studied by Cheron and others.

The green squares are the ones in which the pawn can be placed so that the ending can be won.

I took the picture somewhere in the Chessbase page. The original url is not available anymore.

Weird chess teacher

An unidentified chess piece kind of teaches chess.

The weird facts about the mural chessboard are the following:

- The square in the right corner is not light as it should be
- There are two black Kings on the board
- All the 4 pieces in the chessboard occupy more than one square

Regarding our teacher. Is it a black or a white piece? Hard to tell, his skin is Caucasian but I would rather say he's black.

Which piece it is? I would say a pawn.

I do not like the yellow background.

Echecs - Championnat de France (1925)

Here we have a nice poster for the French national chess championship played in 1925.
The event took place in the beautiful city of Ni ce between September 2 and 11.
The picture is somehow monochromatic but it goes with the cubist aesthetics so in vogue at the time.
As in a painting by George Braque or Juan Gris, a group of cubes (tridimensional squares?) flow over the background, the silhouette of a King.
I did some research in Wikipedia and it seems the champion that year was Robert Crépaux, who had also won the title the previous year in Strasbourg and would make it again in Paris in 1941. One of those inconnus we are indebted with.

Topalov - Kamsky match logo

Today the match between Topalov and Kamsky started. The first game ended in a draw after an interesting Grünfeld in which Topalov sacrificed a pawn for the initiative.

We bring here the logo of the match, Bulgarian (Cyrillic) version and chess.com version. I took it from Susan Polgar's blog.

There is a smaller version that uses the Latin alphabet in the official webpage, but I suppose most chessplayers -smart guys- will be able to read here TOPALOV-KAMSKY, SOFIA 2009.

If we use our mind to delete the chess.com logo, as we would do to imagine the chessboard after some material exchange and simplification, we can see two eagles (or are they vultures?) on top of two spheres that evoke the head of two pawns: a white pawn, a black pawn.

It is going to be a great match. It is already a great logo.

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