From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com Date: 99/12/01, 08:52 Re: Chess History on the Web (1999 no.2) The next review, following the Chess History bookmarks, is for 'Palmarès mondial' by Eric Delaire. The site is listed in the bookmarks as 'Notable tournaments' & its history pages are anchored at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.delaire/Palmares.htm. I'm skipping over the Max Euwe Centrum because it was added as a bookmark only recently & I haven't had a chance to look at it carefully. I'll come back to it in the future. The French title of the history page is 'Palmares des principaux tournois d'Echecs'. Using the full page translation services at http://translator.go.com/, this translates to 'Prize list of the principal chess tournaments'. This is a useful site for anyone who wants a digital record of many of the most important regular chess events. There is lots of well organized data. In addition to its reference value, it is easy to capture, to load into other software (database or spreadsheet), & to perform further analysis. I'll give a few simple examples as I describe the content of the main pages. The first link on the page is [Palmares historique], which lists the strongest tournaments each year since 1983. The last tournament listed is Dortmund, which took place this past July. The year, date, place, category, & winner(s) are given for each tournament. Each entry under 'place' is linked to a page dedicated to that event. It's not clear what criteria were used to select the 108 tournaments on the page, although the important events seem to be covered. Of the 118 winners or cowinners, there are 36 different names. Nine of these names are listed five times or more... 20 Garry Kasparov 10 Viswanathan Anand 9 Anatoly Karpov 7 Jan Timman 6 Vladimir Kramnik 6 Vassily Ivanchuk 6 Alexander Beliavsky 6 Nigel Short 5 Boris Gelfand ...which shows who have been the most successful grandmasters of the last 15 years. The second link is [Top tournois] which lists the strongest tournaments of all time. These are tournaments of category 16 or greater. There have been two category 21 tournaments -- Kasparov won the first at Las Palmas in 1996 & Anand won the second at Linares in 1998. There have also been two category 20 tournaments -- Novgorod 1997 & Linares 1999 -- Kasparov won both. The place, date, average ELO, winner(s), score, & number of players are given for each tournament. The 88 tournaments cover 31 different cities. Cities which have hosted more than five of these tournaments are... 10 Linares 10 Amsterdam 8 Dortmund 6 Tilburg 5 Madrid 5 Dos Hermanas ...confirming that if you live in Spain or the Netherlands, you have ample opportunity to see some great chess. [Tournois] links to 20 different tournaments, finishing with the championship of Paris. Looking at Linares, which we just saw has had its share of super tournaments, there are 16 events listed from 1978 to 1999 -- 15 of them have full crosstables. The first Linares tournament was a category 5 event won by Eslon. There have been 177 participants & 73 different players in the Linares tournaments. Ivanchuk has played there 10 times, more than any other player. [Olympiades] lists 33 tournaments, giving the 1st place team in the men's & women's events. There have been 18 women's events, not all colocated with the men's events. The first official Olympiad is given as 1927 in London & was won by Hungary, which also won the following year. [U.R.S.S. Reste du Monde] is the USSR vs. the rest of the world. Only the 1970 event is listed & it is incomplete. [Matches Vétérans-Femmes] lists the eight Women vs. Veterans events held from 1992 to 1999. There have been 88 participants, with 24 different players, including the three Polgar sisters. Of the 14 different veterans, Smyslov is the only player to have participated in all eight events. Of the 10 different women, Xie Jun has participated in all but the first event & leads the women in number of participations. The five [moins de NN ans] pages list world junior champions in various age categories (less than 10, 12, 14, 16, & 18 years old), for both boys & girls. [juniors, féminines, vétérans, correspondance] list champions in restricted or specialized events -- juniors (starting with Ivkov in 1952), women (Menchik 1927), veterans (Smyslov 1991), & correspondence (Purdy 1953). The men's world champions are covered by a link to my site. [Matches Kasparov-Karpov] has two links. The first is for [Liste récapitulative], which lists 165 KK games through 1996, & displays photos from the first two K-K matches. The second is for [Statistiques] of the matches. [Championnats nationaux] lists the national champions of France (1923-1999), the USSR (1920-1991; Alekhine was the first in 1920), & Belgium (1921-1999). Looking closer at the USSR, Delaire lists 58 official & 2 unofficial USSR championships. These cover 83 (co-)winners, with 42 different players. Leading the champions are Botvinnik, who has won 8 times, & Tal, 6 times. [Elo international] is a link to a 20K ZIP file, which unzips to a 72K XLS file. The Excel spreadsheet contains ELO ratings since January 1971. The players are sorted by descending order of their record high ELO, e.g. Fischer is listed 4th at 2780. Many of the players have their birthday listed. The main page of Delaire's site is at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.delaire/, where he is listed as the club treasurer of Echecs Quimper. Under [Joueurs Quimpérois], we discover that Delaire is rated 1720 (presumably by the French Chess Federation [FFE]) & find a link to his photo. My atlas tells me that Quimper is a French town in the northwest region known as Bretagne, near the Bay of Biscay. After the Palmarès page, the page most relevant to general chess history is [Biographies], which mentions 34 players. The biography for the rising French star Etienne Bacrot covers the highlights of his career from winning the 1991 European under-8 title through his September 1999 loss to Beliavsky. Regional chess history is covered by [Champions du Finistère] for the French administrative department known as Finistère, [Champions de Bretagne], & [Base Française] a collection of PGN games played in France. The other links on the page are club pages of less interest to chess history, although [Maximes] has a few chess sayings, some in French & others in English. There is also a list of the most recent changes to the site. --- This site has come a long way since Delaire first sent me an email message flagging its presence. I expect that it will continue to grow as an important online reference. I have a few nitpicks -- there are some inconsistencies in names (Korchnoi & Kortchnoï) and the dates would be more useful in ISO format -- but these are easily fixed. About the only thing missing on these pages are the games behind the events. I have a feeling that Delaire is collecting PGN scores as he goes along, and that one day we will see these as well. Bye for now, Mark Weeks