Vertical chess

My friend Jordi emailed me some pictures taken in a rural holiday home somewhere in Catalonia. There was this nice wall chess. Not very practical for playing but enjoyable as a piece of art.

Borges

In their solemn corner, the players move
The slow pieces. The board detains them
Until the dawn in its severe world
In which two colors hate each other.
Within the forms irradiates magic
Strictness: Homeric rook, swift
Knight, armed queen, crucial king,
Oblique bishop and aggressive pawns.
Once the players have finally left,
Once time has devoured them,
Surely the ritual will not have ended.
In the orient like this very war flared up
Whose amphitheater today is the earth entire.
Like the other, the game is infinite.

Obama chess arbiter between Israel and Palestine

A nice one by Shlomo Cohen

Mind Games

I like this one by Tony Lurie, but how much of a game has already been determined without even moving the first pawn? My current opinion is that a lot of it.

Dublin: Chess at the Point

This morning I walked to the Point, where there is an interesting street market at the weekends. You can find it at the end of the Luas line, between the O2 Point Theatre and the new Hotel Gibson. There are stalls with different products on offer and a few other things to entertain the passers by. One of those is a chess set that I would not call a giant chess set. Two girls were playing with the pieces. Not exactly playing chess.

Kiev ; Playing chess in the park

I saw this group of citizens of Kiev (or Kyiv) playing chess in a park close to the university.
They were using the old soviet Yantaz clocks. A nice way to spend the morning.

Chess pressure

Comic strip by Mordillo, in which he plays with the idea of chess sides and races. Today Anand and Topalov are playing in Sofia. It is the second game of their match for the World Championship. Indeed, the audience favours the Bulgarian, and there will not be quite half of them supporting Anand. It may be that playing at home turns a disadvantage due to an excess of pressure, but the unequal situation reminded me of this vignette.