Chess briefs

BY: BOBBY ANG

(An abridged version of Chess Piece, BusinessWorld, 17 April 2011)

The French Winawer

Around 20 years ago Inside Chess published a series of chess articles on how White should play against the French Winawer and even Yasser Seirawan made the comment that this variation does not cut it anymore in top-level competition. Well, of course he has been proven wrong, but a lot of that analysis, if my memory does not fail me they were written by Cuban GM Amador Rodriguez, was quite good.

The following game is another example of a French line being refuted.

Grigorian, Avetik (2608) -- Apicella, Manuel (2531) [C19]
12th ch-EUR Aix-les-Bains FRA (11), 02.04.2011
REQUIRES JAVA




I forgot to mention last week, but if any of our readers wants to see the games of the just-concluded UAAP chess season, just e-mail me at the address below and I will send you a portable game notation (pgn) file with all the games from the senior, women’s and junior divisions.

Portable Game Notation is a text file with the extension *.pgn. The move are stored in algebraic notation in ordinary text, while the game data (names of players, tournament, date, etc etc) are also in plain txt but arranged in a particular way so that most chess playing software can read it, including the popular chessmaster and fritz programs.

In addition to that, you can also download a pgn reader for free from the Internet. My experience is that one of the best of these is chessbase lite. Just follow the link below in your browser. Just install in your PC, click "open file" and point it to the pgn file. Chessbase lite even comes with a free chess engine to help you analyze the game.

http://www.chessbase.com/download/download2.asp

Reader comments/suggestions are solicited. E-mail address is bangcpa@gmail.com