Merry Christmas, the war is over soon (also: Finally bring down the NYT!)

 Merry Christmas, my fellow friends!

It seems that we will win the war against the China Virus soon. We should not settle for any less than the complete extermination of our enemy, and that is where we might be getting at, thanks to new medical breakthroughs. The following one looks especially interesting.

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-creates-single-vaccine-effective-against-all-covid-sars-variants/360089/

 

Keep on fighting, my friends. Stay healthy, and if the SPFN vaccine will actually work to exterminate our enemy, we will hopefully live in a free world in a year again. At least as free as possible with the devastation that was caused, and with the lost trust in governments and a hostile mass media that calls it racist to shut down international travel.

I'll rather live in a world of racists than in a world of dead people because of mass media cronies trying to help our enemy to spread. Never forget that in early 2020 those fascists actively tried to help the virus to spread by advising against shutting down airports!

But then, the New York Times is widely known as the propaganda newspaper of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. And they were among the antisemitic mass media that called everything racist that a certain jewish family father did during his presidency. So never forget that the mass media rather would play politics and kill millions than actually do anything sane. Hold them accountable when this is over.

Gaprindashvili sues Netflix

The child porn distributor "Netflix" (publisher of "Cuties" alias "Mignonnes", which is banned on 4chan for child pornography) is sued by Nona Gaprindashvili, as their chess series "The Queen's Gambit" contains racist and sexist propaganda against the Georgian master. She was racially insulted as a "Russian" and it was said she never has played against a man.

We hope that governments and prosecutions also finally will step in and crack down on Netflix. We deeply condemn any racist, sexist, and child pornographic propaganda, as spread on that disgusting platform, and we hope that Nona will sue them into oblivion!

New York Times smear piece about Karjakin - true or not?

 The racist "newspaper" New York Times, once gladly a mouthpiece of Adolf Hitler (see "Buried by the Times") and Josef Stalin (see Walter Durante) that denied the holodomor, and in the past years running the unhinged conspiracy theory that Russia helped Donald Trump (who has a jewish family, fitting with the earlier NYT smears) become President of the United States with election fraud, now expanded its racist smear pieces into the world of chess, "exposing" both Sergey Karjakin and the First Saturday tourneys in Budapest as supposed "grandmaster norm factories".

After this utter crap was re-published in the German magazine "Schach", which obviously fell for the propaganda surrounding the newspaper that portrays it as trustworthy, I want to let readers decide on their own which parts of the story are true and which are made up. Who knows, maybe for once some parts of the story hold up. After all, Karjakin is a bit suspicious. At least the German magazine, as opposed to the original author, did its due diligence and reproduced two of the games and footnotes that hint towards the hit piece having a core of truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/sports/chess-karjakin-mishra-grandmasters.html

An idea and its variation

 EG 225 offers to me two ideas and their variations. One is mentioned in the magazine's supplement, the other is one I only knew, as I had tried to make something off of it.

Siegfried Hornecker, Original (omposed 27 October 2004)

White to move and win

The solution 1.d:e8R! Qg8+ 2.Kh3 Q:e8 3.B:f5 Qe7 4.Rd7! Qg7 5.R:g7 wins with the d-pawn advancing if the queen remains on e7 and f7 lacks a proper introduction and is overall ugly, but the basic idea was nice. Nothing ever came of it, however.

 

The next year, this study was composed and published (abridged):

 

Siegfried Hornecker, Schach 12/2005

White to move and win

The first few moves were left out here, as they are just a horrible introduction with captures that should have been left out in the first place. 5.Be8! Rf7! 6.Kg3!! Rf8 7.f7 R:f7 8.d6 Rf8 9.d7 R:e8 10.d:e8R! wins

 

Using this matrix and the previous position's idea, some time around 2020 I arrived at something like this - no trace is left in the database, as I found nothing that works.

 

 

Siegfried Hornecker (modified), around 2020 (reconstruction)

Black to move, White wins

 

Only while writing this blog post, I arrived at the pawn pair e3/e4 to make the matrix work. Removing those, it was intended to be some kind of zugzwang. Black should have no square for the queen on the diagonal, so after 1.-Qf5+ 2.R:f5 mate but at the time I found no working setting, and the one I found now is more ugly than good.

I was surprised to find a similar position on the front page of EG 225, and remembering my idea within a second I arrived at the conclusion that 1.Rf7 must be the key there.

Yochanan Afek & Amatzia Avni, 2nd FRME tt 2020, prize

White to move and win (end of study)

Obviously it was not, they had found a completely different idea than what I sought, and must have found it a few months prior to me trying the similar setting.

Yochanan Afek & Amatzia Avni, 2nd FRME tt 2020, prize

White to move and win

 

The solution runs 1.Bg4+! K:g4 2.Sg6 S:a7 3.R:a7 Kh5 4.Kh3 K:g6 5.Se5+ Kh5 and the diagram above is reached: 6.Sg6!! K:g6 7.h5+ K:h5 8.R:h7 wins, or 6.-Q:g6 7.Ra5+ Qg5 8.h:g5 wins

 

There is nothing new under the sun when I try to compose, and sometimes a masterpiece is just one piece moved to another position away. And getting to that position two years earlier.

 

Congratulations to Yochanan and Amatzia for the incredible finding and the interesting introduction with Anzizielelement (the king leaving h5 first).

 

[DE] Suche nach Hörfunkreihe "Das Gericht zieht sich zur Beratung zurück"

 Die wohl erste deutsche Gerichtsshow, damals mit echten Fällen, die nachempfunden wurden, ist die in den 1950ern erschienene Hörfunkreihe "Das Gericht zieht sich zur Beratung zurück". Der NDR hat mir für mein Privatarchiv freundlicherweise die beiden Folgen "Bewußtseinsstörung" und "Brandserie im Kreis Rechlitz" überlassen. Diese können dort für 10 Euro auf CD angefordert werden und sind nach Angaben meiner Kontaktperson sicher archiviert. Aus rechtlichen Gründen darf ich sie nicht veröffentlichen.

 

Die anderen 77 Folgen scheinen verschollen. Wer weitere Folgen bereitstellen oder Hinweise zu deren Verbleib machen kann, kontaktiert bitte den NDR sowie auch mich (sh-schach@gmx.eu).

Schach-Fan issue 10 with Hornecker/Minski study

 The new magazine "Schach-Fan", which is aimed at beginners to improve their tactical skills, features the study by Martin Minski (composition) and me (idea) from "Schach", October 2016.

Interested readers can subscribe to the free magazine at their website http://schachwoche.de/ where also all issues are available for download. The magazine is in German, but it should be easy also for foreign readers to follow the diagrams and solutions.

I was a fan of Mikhail Zinar

 After the unecpected death of Mikhail Zinar, I wrote a memorial article in two parts about him. You can find it on ChessBase:

https://en.chessbase.com/post/study-of-the-month-2021-02 - Part I

https://en.chessbase.com/post/study-of-the-month-2021-03 - Part II

Most information in the articles is from a 2008 article by Sergey N. Tkachenko:

The King of Pawn Endgames (Russian)