Berlin Alexanderplatz

 

Berlin Alexanderplatz. January 2007. A table in a café. 4x4 chessboard which includes every single piece, but the Rook appears twice. It is hard to determine the colour of some of the pieces as only the Bishop and the Knight are totally White.

Check Mate (a Mini car in Cologne)

What a tiny lovely thing! I catched a glimpse of it in Cologne, while we were waiting for the tramway. a black-and-white Mini car, whose name is "Check Mate"

El Che en Colonia

Also in Cologne, not so far away from the Grünfeld pub, there is a tobacconist who sells Cuban habanos. We have already talked about Cuba in Chess Images, when we received the visit of Fidel Castro.

In this German tobacco shop we found his revolutionary colleague Ernesto "Che" Guevara, also a chess fan. In front of his image, a chess set, including what I would call "Napoleonic" chessmen.

Allons enfants de la patrie, hasta la victoria siempre.

Grünfeld in Cologne

I had not post much in the last days, as I've been in holidays. I enjoyed a nice trip visiting several German cities, Köln - Cologne, among them.

I came accross a beer garden whose name must be familiar to chess fans. Grünfeld is German for "green field" (or even the more appropiate "green square"), but for the chess player it evokes the Grünfeld Defence, a sequence 1.d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5, a favourite of Kasparov in the beginning of the 1990s.

Indeed Grünfeld or Gruenfeld is quite a normal-sounding German name and I would not have taken the picture if a nice Black Knight had not been there. By the way, you can see me in the reflection