Scoresheets from hell...

ChessBase has a recent article about the World Youth Chess Championship, taking place from the 17th to 29th of this month. There's a brief history of the WYCC and a good photo essay that includes some snaps of the "cuddly 11-year-old uber-prodigy" Ilya Nyzhnyk. Here's a link if you are interested in reading the story:

World Youth Chess Championship

Anyway, what I wanted to draw attention to was the unusual problems that organizers sometimes have when trying to document the moves of the games.

The following quotation refers to WFM Emine Yanik who used to play in the German League.

"Emine, who speaks German like a native, showed us how time-consuming, laborious and frustrating it can sometimes be to try to decipher moves written down in different languages by very young children. Often it takes Sherlockian skills to deduce the intention of a notation. And sometimes, in the games of the smallest of the small, the moves may not be completely legal. In one game we followed the players moving in and out of checkmate. Here the wits of the bulletin editor, and of the ChessBase program they are using, were at an end."

"...[M]oving in and out of checkmate" goes beyond the ability of the ChessBase program to handle. Now that would make you want to pull your hair out. Argg. And orthodox chess players tell me that fairy chess, and the software used to handle such heterodox versions of chess, are of no practical use. au contraire!

There is a rich variety of high level events in the world of chess right now. The Tal Memorial was just completed. The World Blitz Championship, having perhaps the strongest field in the history of such an event, was recently won by Ukrainian Vassily Ivanchuk over the likes of Anand, Kramnik, Leko, Morozevich and over a dozen other GMs and Super-GMs. Starting this weekend is the World Chess Cup 2007 in Khanty-Mansiysk in which 128 top players will compete in a knock-out event. In the first round, Canadian Igor Zugic will be up against Michael Adams, the strongest player in the history of chess in the British Isles. Good luck Igor! The other thing of note in the world of chess is the easily accessible videos available to anyone with an ordinary computer and an internet connection. The video of Ivanchuk's win against Anand in the World Blitz Championship is already available. Amazing. The internet has transformed and changed many aspects of chess forever ... and that includes the accessibility of chess journalism of the highest calibre. Do we live in a golden age of chess today?