Site review - Schachgeschichte

It seems like a long time since I last reviewed a real web site. For
those of you who have recently joined this email list, the sites that
I review can be found on the page...

Chess History on the Web
http://members.tripod.com/~Mark_Weeks/Chs-hist/chs-hist.htm

...I'm on my second pass through the list, reviewing sites which were
added while I was making the first pass. For this review, I'll be
looking at...

Schachgeschichte by Fred Kahl
http://www.schachgeschichte.de/

...There remains only the 'Game is Afoot', the 'Open Directory World
Champions', and the 'World Chess Network'.

---

Schachgeschichte is a German language site, so I had to use the
BabelFish service to understand better the content of the page. If
you need to do the same, the address is...

AltaVista BabelFish on Schachgeschichte
http://jump.altavista.com/trans.go?
urltext=http://www.schachgeschichte.de/chess/index1.htm

...I use BabelFish because any links on a translated page are
automatically converted to call the translation service, which makes
it easy to traverse a translated version of the site. There is,
unfortunately, an artificial limit imposed on the length of a
translated page. When that limit is reached, BabelFish abruptly
inserts a '*** TRANSLATION ENDS HERE ***' message and continues in
the original language.

BabelFish tells us that 'Schachgeschichte' means 'chess history'. The
site uses two frames -- a small frame on the left with ten navigation
buttons controls the content displayed in a larger frame on the
right. The start page displays a random photo of one of the
grandmasters covered by the site. The page behind the copyright
notice says that the home page has been on the Internet since 9
September 1999, while the start page says that the last update was on
22 June 2001.

Where do the ten navigation buttons lead? The first button, [Hall of
Fame], covers 16 world champions. Numbers 1 to 13 follow the
generally accepted numbering for Steinitz through Kasparov; Khalifman
is listed as the 14th, Anand the 15th, and Kramnik is listed
as 'Inoffizieller Weltmeister'. Each champion has a single page with
a detailed biography, photos, and, occasionally, a few career
statistics. Players and events covered elsewhere on the site are
linked whenever they are mentioned.

[Grossmeister] uses the same format as the [Hall of Fame]. There are
links to the 15 unsuccessful world champion challengers, including
players in the 1948 tournament. Also covered are 8 'Bedeutende
Meister' (important masters) -- Philidor, Morphy, Anderssen,
Rubinstein, Pillsbury, Nimzowitsch, Spielmann, & Reti.

[WM-Matche] lists the world championship matches and links to a
separate page on each match. The first match is 1866 Steinitz -
Anderssen ('inoffizieller'); the second is 1886 Steinitz - Zukertort;
the Steinitz matches between 1866 and 1886 are not mentioned. Purists
will note that 1909 Lasker - Janowski is incorrectly listed as a
title match. Both the 2000 Anand - Shirov FIDE knockout final and the
2000 Kramnik - Kasparov Braingames event are covered. The individual
page for each match has opening statistics and the lengths of the
games.

[WM-Turniere] ('world championship tournaments') covers the 15 FIDE
qualifying cycles from 1948-1951 through 1991-1993. The most recent
1994-1996 FIDE and 1994-1995 PCA cycles are not listed. Each cycle
has a separate page with full crosstables for the interzonal and
candidate events which made up the cycle. For some reason, the page
on the 1991-1993 cycle is missing completely.

The page [Turniere] is marked 'under construction' and, indeed, has
only a single link to London 1851. That page has a narrative about
the tournament, round by round results, and a further link, 'Partien
des Turniers', where all games can be followed online.

[Statistiken] has tables showing overall won, loss, & drawn records
for each of the 13 world champions; rank by winning percentage for
the champions (Lasker 1st ... Euwe 13th); rank by winning percentage
for the challengers (Keres & Reshevsky 1st ... Janowski 15th); count
of openings used for each match from 1886 (9 Queen Gambits Declined
lead the list) through 1998 (4 Queen Gambits); the top ten openings
across all matches (1st : 240 Queen Gambits, 2nd : 122 Ruy Lopezes,
3rd : 76 Sicilians); and a summary of the same statistics that are
displayed for each individual match. Here we learn that 40.070 moves
have been played in world championship matches (incl. 1948), for an
average of 47 moves per game. That's fighting chess! Rounding out the
stats are a list of games with more than 100 moves, with less than 15
moves, and which ended in checkmate.

The [Download] page has game files for the events and players covered
by the site. The downloadable files are all in uncompressed PGN
format. 'Tools und Programme' lists one file, Compochess, a 'chess
database to administer and play through PGN games', which I didn't
download.

The remaining navigation buttons -- [Links], [Email], and
[Gaestebuch] ('guestbook') -- are the usual functions that we see in
most web sites.

---

The Schachgeschichte site makes an excellent impression. Its only
drawback is for people who don't speak German. The original material
not available on other sites is biographical or descriptive and is
often too long to be translated completely by BabelFish.

Until a few years ago, there was an English language site,
www.chesschampions.com, which had biographies on the world champions.
Curious about the fate of this site, I discovered that it is now
unused but registered to RareNames of Washington, DC, a domain name
broker. Although the chesschampions.com site has been gone since
1999, an AltaVista search on link:www.chesschampions.com reported
that 288 Web pages still link to the site. RareNames is offering the
domain name for $888.00.

I decided to look for other information on the world champions,
hoping to find a new site like chesschampions.com. I ran a Google
search on...

Search the web for steinitz lasker karpov kasparov.
http://www.google.com/search?
q=steinitz+lasker+karpov+kasparov+&btnG=Google+Search

...reckoning that those four names would return pages covering all of
the first 13 champs. Google reported finding 1620 pages. Looking at
the first 64 results, I discovered that five sites were listed twice
and five had disappeared ('The requested URL was not found on this
server' or 'Could not connect to the server'). Many of the remaining
54 pages were lists of world champions. Nearly half were in languages
other than English -- 6 French, 6 Italian, 3 Dutch, 3 German
(including Kahl's site), 3 Spanish, 2 Portuguese, & 2 Swedish.

Last year, in Chess History on the Web (2000 no.21) dated 2000/11/01,
I briefly reported on the progress of the Kasparov - Kramnik match,
when it looked certain that Kramnik was going to win. I asked 'What
title will [Kramnik] hold and will he be numbered as the 14th world
champion? These issues will be largely decided by the court of public
opinion. Yes, your opinion counts.'

The Google search gave me some simple data which could be used as a
preliminary poll of the court of public opinion. I counted 23 sites
which listed world champions. For each of these sites, I determined
whether the site considered Anand or Kramnik to be the current world
chess champion, or whether both were considered to be equal world
champions. My own site, for example, at...

World Chess Championship
http://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/wcc-indx.htm

...which popped out in 1st/2nd position on the Google search, treats
both Anand and Kramnik as legitimate world champions. What about the
other 22 sites? I discovered that 7 were for FIDE, 2 were for Kramnik
(or Kasparov), and 13 treated them equally. Unfortunately, even the
two pages that I counted for Kramnik were both a bit of a stretch.
One was...

'Chess History Rape' by Lev Khariton
http://www.clubkasparov.ru/news/lasvegas/itog2_e.htm

...written after the 1999 Las Vegas event. It used the often repeated
argument that Khalifman, who is not named in the article, did not
have the same stature as preceding titleholders, and was not a real
world champion. The page had no list of champions, came from the
clubkasparov.ru site, and used reasoning which became obsolete when
Anand won the FIDE title. I could have excluded it as biased, but
then I would have had to identify sites on the other side loyal to
FIDE out of affiliation. I counted it as +1 for Kramnik.

The other Kramnik page, which I won't identify, lists only Kasparov
matches after 1990, includes '1993 Kasparov - Timman' (in addition to
1993 Kasparov - Short), and overlooks the 1995 Kasparov - Anand
match. I could have excluded the page as an incompetent reference,
but then I would have to examine all of the other pages more
carefully. I also counted it as +1 for Kramnik.

How should we evaluate my result of +7-2=14? It's too small a sample
to be conclusive, but if I were squarely in the Kasparov - Kramnik -
Braingames camp, I'd be nervous. Several of the pages on the +7 side
didn't even mention the three Kasparov matches. Others
listed 'Official Matches' followed by 'PCA' matches, or listed
Kasparov matches as 'Ciclo no oficial'.

It appears that some students of chess history are rejecting the idea
that Kramnik represents an unbroken chain of champions going back to
Steinitz, each of whom won the title by defeating his predecessor.
Instead, it looks more and more as though FIDE's actions of 1993 were
the third time -- counting 1948 and 1975 as the first and second --
where the only governing body accepted by national chess federations
was forced to take exceptional action to guarantee the continuity of
the world title.

Time will tell. The court of public opinion is still deliberating.

---

Let's go back to the Google search and see what other sites are worth
mentioning. Ten that were particularly interesting were...

'You can edit this page right now! It's a free, community project'
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Chess/WorldChampions

La galerie des dessins et caricatures de Eric Petit
http://www.notzai.com/notzai/galerie/index.shtml

Royal Game by NM Dan Heisman
http://www.homestead.com/seventhrank/chesshistory.html

A World-class Collection by Taylor Kingston
http://www.chesscafe.com/text/cwc.txt

The 64 Greatest Chess Games Ever Played
http://chess.about.com/library/blclassic.htm

THEMATIQUE PHILATELIQUE SUR LE JEU D' ECHECS 1995 - 1999
http://www.faulquemont.com/phil71.html

KONINGSMOORD
http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/admag/wkv.htm

Die 10 besten Partien aller Zeiten
http://www.chessbase.de/Umfrage/best10/best10ranking.htm

A History of Chess by Burt Hochberg
http://www.luxurychess.com/chesshistory1.html

Viswanathan Anand - The Grandmaster on his ten greatest chess players
http://www.rediff.com/millenni/anand.htm

...but after looking at Google's first 64 suggestions, I still
haven't found a site with biographical material on all of world
champions comparable to Kahl's Schachgeschichte. Perhaps there is a
good site further down on the Google list or perhaps a subscriber to
this email list knows of a site that I've overlooked.

Bye for now,
Mark Weeks

---

[The bookmarks for the sites reviewed in this newsletter may be found
at...

The Chess History discussion group
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/chesshistory

...where you are invited to join and contribute. The list archive is
at...

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Chess_History/messages

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