We have our big Tournament coming up very soon

• Who: Chess players of all levels
• What: An open tournament with great prizes for the winners, and refreshments for all.
• Where: Rooms 301 and 302 in the student centre
• When: This Thursday, October 29th from 6 PM – midnight (if you have to come late or leave early that’s fine, just let us know ahead of time so we save you a spot in our crosstables when organizing the games)
• Why: To promote chess at McMaster, meet fellow players and have fun!

Please note that we will be collecting a $2 entrance fee, to help cover the cost of refreshments and prizes.

Also, as some of you may know, this tournament is an opportunity for us to select our new Board 1 player for the McMaster Chess Team

Come out and show off your skills, and you may be on the team that will represent McMaster at the Canadian University Chess Championships

—Checkmate Exec Team

We are back for day of the Beginners Beware Series. This one is particularly short!

Pretrov’s Defense is an opening that offers lots of dynamism and counterplay to both parties. However, the is one little hiccup everyone should be aware of:

Here is when we go off the book, White can try to win the queen with the following line:

And Black is looking pretty bad. There is no way to save the Queen.

The take home message for beginners is to keep in mind that when there is a double check—that is when the King is being checked by to pieces at the same time—the King has to move, there is no way around it. This can certainly have devastating results as proven by this example.

‘Til next time!

If you are lazy like me, Stagecoach Designs recently posted a reference to a really well done video that covers the topic quite well in just a few minutes:

http://www.stagecoachdesigns.com/blog/2009/05/by-nik/a-simple-look-at-really-simple-syndication/

If your are a nerd, also like me, you can also visit the Wikipedia page on the subject.

Finally, if you actually like my crappy way of explaining things, read on…

So, RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. WOW! Who cares.

Basically, most modern websites now have the innate ability to summarize their content and content updates into a “feed”. In other words, you can quickly glance over all of their pages and articles the way you would look at Google search results. This has the potential to make your life a lot easier.

For example, using Firefox, which I hope one day will come with your computer instead of the insanely more stupid Internet Explorer (Safari is ok too by the way), you can subscribe to a website by clicking on their big old RSS button, or RSS link(s). The icon is typically orange and it looks like a broadcasting signal. We have one on the right column of this website by the way!

One trick I like to use ocassionally is just to type “feed” into the homepage URL of a website I am considering subscribing myself to.

e.g. www.website-url.com/feed, or www.website-url.com/blog/feed

This way I get to quickly glance at what they have done recently and decide whether I am subscribing or not.

Firefox by default uses what the call “Live Bookmarks”, which actually generate dropdown menus with the latest article titles from the website you subscribed too.

Other people actually prefer to use free services like Google Reader or My Yahoo to send and categorize all of their feeds in one place.

Moreover, for the people out there that are hardcore programmers (and are at least familiar with PHP), there is the SimplePie library that gives you a really nice set of functions you can use to manipulate all this information.

One of my personal projects in the near future, will involve nicely displaying My Daily Reads, which are just a bunch of websites that try to keep up with. So, stay tuned for more on that later.

Finally, here is why you should do it: it saves tons of time! Specially if you like to follow the news here and there or if you know different bloggers all over the place that you would like to keep up with. Believe me, most people can be interesting.

So I decided to take initiative here with the tutorials. This is the first of many to come! Beyond that, I have planned out this whole series of tutorials for beginners: Beginners Beware.

If you are interested in writing your tutorials, either email them to me in a similar format, or join the team to contribute to the site in general. I will be glad to teach you how to do it on your own.

Continue reading to learn about one of the most common traps in this opening, every chess player should be familiar with.

Here’s the deal, as a chess player, you have to be confident in “guessing” what your opponent’s threats are. Especially when it may seem they just made a mistake.

Hanging Queen

Always beware of what your opponent leaves behind. Sometimes this is done on purpose. This example springs out of one of the most common openings in chess, The Giouco Piano:

Say what?! The Queen has just been exposed! This is actually a mistake. White should not try to do this. Never assume your opponent is an idiot.

Black can and should simply take back with the knight, but for the sake of the example, if the Queen is taken, mate in 2 follows.

Simple enough eh?

One thing I realized as I was writing this tutorial is that maybe not everyone will be familiar with the Algebraic Chess Notation I used to describe the moves here, so thank God for Wikipedia.

In a nutshell, think of the board as a Cartesian coordinate system, columns (or files) are letters A-H, rows (or ranks) are numbers 1-8. Pieces are symbolized by their first uppercase letter (except for the knights which take on the “N” instead). When the letter is omitted, people are referring to a pawn. ‘x’ means captute, ‘+’ check, ‘??’ bad move, ‘?!’ questionable move, ‘!?’ interesting move, ‘!’ and ‘!!’ mean good/great move, and ‘#’ means mate.

~Cheers,

I just thought I would walk you through some of the new features on the site.

1. We are pollin’

We want to hear your voice! And without further ado, our first poll is out: Who do you think is the greatest FIDE World Chess Champion in History. Let us know who is your favorite, and if your favorite was not listed, leave a comment! We will be using our polls to later find out what is your preferred location for our meetings, and things like that, so keep an eye on them.

2. Comments.

Again, this is your site, and we really encourage and appreciate your participation. We are planning to post tutorials and articles in the future (like this one) that will be open for discussion, which means you will be able to drop us a line on the topic at hand. So, if you have something to say, please share!

3. Stay connected!

If you subscribe to our RSS Feed or to the site itself, you will get the latest posts and articles at a glance through your browser bookmarks, email or your mobile device(s)! Trust me, this is the easiest, quickest way to know what we have been up to. If you have any technical questions about any of these services, feel free to ask me; I swear I don’t bite (hard).

Alternatively, you can also follow us on Facebook!

4. Daily Chess Puzzle

Pretty self explanatory I suppose. If you are like me, and need a little push once in a while to jump-start your brain, you can check this pretty sweet freebie out. Courtesy of Shedder Computer Chess, this plugin offers three puzzles with increasing levels of difficulty. Stop by and crack your skulls any day —as if life wasn’t hard enough already!

If you want to join the team, contact us and you will hear back from us in no time!

So, please cast your vote, and if you think we didn’t list your favorite chess historical figure, comment your heart away below!

Our team finished second just behind Western in the B section of the tournament. That is players with less than 1500 point in the FIDE ratings scale.

Once again, congratulations.

Pictures are, as promised, finally here!

Congratulations to Nelish and Rob who made it to the final and thus qualified to represent McMaster this upcoming January at the inter-universities tournament at Queens University

We will keep you posted for the next one!

If you would like to be added to our mailing list, just send us an email to mcmastercheckmate@gmail.com so that you don’t miss on our events!

We are already meeting for friendly matches in the Student Centre tables in front of William’s Coffee on Thursdays from 6:00 – 8:00 pm.

So, if you are bored playing with yourself at home, come play with us. Also, if you are planning to become a regular and these things actually matter to you, don’t forget to take our survey and help us decide if changing locations is worthy (among other things).

Check out some of the “Kodak moments”: