It is always a delight to watch Amber chess tournament. They have a simple nice website with all the information needed easily accessible. If you go to the home page you will get the day’s results. If you click on the Games section you will get a link to the live games. The page which has the applet with live games also does not show any other distracting images. But I wish it was accessible from the front page with one click. They have added twitter and audio commentary this time. Click on each of the sections Scores, Schedule etc. you get exactly what you expect, simple and clean. You might think what is the big deal. But it is always a pain to try to watch games from any other big chess tournament. I don’t know how they can make a mess out of displaying 64 squares and simple 1-0 or 0.5 scores.

Amber must be very enjoyable for the players also. They can play without worrying about their ratings and for a good prize money. And of course you will get to see the occasional human side of these giants by some rare blunders.

Viswanathan Anand has given an interview to Outlook India. When he was talking about his first computer usage, he mentioned,

At the beginning I was totally proficient in using the mouse upside down. I had no idea. I had just started using the mouse in reverse and I found it moved. He was absolutely impressed that I could do it perfectly, I had no issues whatsoever. I was just doing it upside down.

This was very funny. It reminded me of my own embarrassing moments when I was first introduced to the computer.

As usual web presence of Linares chess seems to be lacking a lot. The official website only in Spanish does not have any live relays. Chessdom has live relays of two of the four games with commentary. I could not even find that when the Topalov-Kamsky game is on. I have found the live relay of all games available from ChessOK. This site is nice, clean and fast updating with analysis from Rybka chess engine.

Nice video review of AT&T Fuze is available at WMExperts.

Anand drew the 11th game against Kramnik in their 12 game match to win with 6.5-4.5 score. All the games were exciting and had fighting chess. I congratulate the organizers for making the tournament smooth and for a wonderful internet broadcast. I think this is the first time an important chess match broadcast on the internet, worked without any hiccups right from the start. I thank Susan Polgar, Dennis Monokroussos and chessdom for their live commentary during the games.

Congratulations to Anand who is also now number one in the live ratings list.

Out of 12 games 8 are over and Anand leads by a big margin of 3 points. Kramnik needs to win 3 games in the remaining 4 to go to tie break. The chances are very slim for that.

I found two more websites with nice live commentary of the games. Susan Polgar’s blog and Chess Mind blog by Dennis Monokroussos. Both of them have very good commentary of the game. But they do not carry board position for every move. So you also might want to follow the game in the official site simultaneously to look at the position. While chessdom website which I mentioned earlier is good I found it to be slow some times. The board also some times got messed up and I do not know why it tries to connect to the server every time you click the button for a move. Also the advertisements on the game analysis page is not something you want to see in an office environment.

Chess world championship 2008 has started. Anand the defending champion and Kramnik are playing. Three games are over now. The first two games were drawn. Anand drew first blood by winning with black today. You can watch the world championship live at the official site. This is not exactly live and has 30 minutes delay.

Getting access to the games itself was a big problem in the last championship tournament at Mexico. Here they have done a good job of anticipating the traffic and I did not find any problem in getting to one of the ten servers through which the official site is relaying the games. I find chessdom website with live commentary to be better for watching the games with lesser delay.

Amber blindfold and rapid chess tournament started today. There were two decisive rapid games and three decisive blindfold games. Anand beat Kramnik in rapid and drew in the blindfold. Aronian is the only other person who won in the rapid section which was against Van Wely. In blindfold Topalov, Karjakin and Ivanchuk won against Leko, Gelfand and Carlsen respectively. The live relay from the official site worked perfectly from the first round itself.

All the games were drawn in the last round. Anand won with 8.5 points. Carlsen was second with 8 points. Aronian and Topalov finished third with 7.5 points. Anand drew easily with Topalov. Carlsen tried hard against Radjabov, since a win would have given him a tie for first place. But Radjabov defended carefully in a rook ending with a pawn down to obtain the draw.

The big news in this tournament is the performance of Carlsen. He will be the biggest rating points gainer in this tournament. At this rate he will soon become the top player. Leko and Shirov who finished last would like to forget about this tournament as soon as possible.

I hope the organizers in the future would plan better for the internet audiences. The java applet by itself was ok. But who wants to see all those logos or even the stream of photos. They just hog the bandwidth making the site terribly slower. An English site would also be nice.

Some interesting notes about this tournament:

• Anand has the least number of losses: only one. Every body else has at least two losses.
• Topalov has the minimum number of draws: 5.
• Anand beat Shirov in both their games. Carlsen beat Topalov in both their games. Topalov and Ivanchuk beat Leko in both their games.
• Radjabov has the maximum number of draws: 10.
• Topalov and Carlsen have the maximum number of wins: 5.

Next big chess tournament is Amber blindfold and rapid starting on March 15th.

Tournament leader Anand drew easily against Ivanchuk with black and remained as leader. Carlsen did an exchange sacrifice against Aronian which tied up Aronian’s pieces. But there was nothing more and they agreed to a draw. Shirov blundered against Radjabov loosing an exchange without compensation and resigned soon. This is not a tournament Leko would like to remember. He lost against Topalov today.

With Anand in the lead, Carlsen is half a point behind, and Aronian and Topalov are one point behind. Tomorrow Anand is playing Topalov. Topalov has to win to have a chance of winning the tournament. If Topalov and Aronian win and Carlsen draws then there will be four players finishing first with 8 points each. But if Anand drew then only Carlsen has a chance to catch him with a win.