Oh, forget it. I just looked at his profile.......the solution was one click away, but i have spent a century looking at Google......

Well, if you really want to win the 1 year, then you have to post both 4 questions at the same post. That means a post with question-1 and another post later with question-2 is pointless, as even if both q-1 and q-2 are correct they are not part of the same post.......

By the way, does anyone remember the Gothic Chess page of Schachmdmt? I don't remember the ending.... I try gothicchess.aus/ast but nothing works

Chessmaster1000:

Q1:
part1:
1.e3 j5 2. Cd3 Rj6 3. Qf3 Rg6 4. Cf4 h6 5. Cxg6#

part2:
1. f3 a5 2. Cd3 Ra6 3. Cf4 Rg6 4. Ad4 h6 5. Ab3 f6 6. Cxg6#

Well since last time nobody succedded, i will increase the prize..... So here is your chance to win a one year membership here, with a lot of effort of course........

The first one who will post here at
Gothic Chess discussion board and only here, the correct answers to the above 4 questions, will win a 1 year Rook membership...........

The 4 questions are here.


***If there are no answers or any correct one until 10/02/2005, there will be no winner.......
***If someone posts more than 1 answer, then the accepted one, will be ONLY his last one. That means even if someone posts a correct answer before everyone, but posts another one later, not correct this time, he would not win as the accepted answer will be the last one. Even if anyone else hasn't answered correctly.......
***In the extremely rare case when there will be 2 or more correct answers at the exactly same time, the winner will be the one whose post will appear first at the Gothic Chess discussion board.
***I will post if there is a winner or not at 10/02/2005.

redsales: of course the public rumour was not started by cerebro ... sorry if there is any misunderstandign!

well said. schachmdmt, it was not Cerebro that started the public rumor, he was just attempting to squelch it and put it to rest.

The problem is that a user was openly blamed for it, and he did not do it. I merely seek to clarify that. In the moment Ed Trice mentioned somebody by name, as a moderator I have no choice but to make it clear that Stevie did not do it.

gentlemen! the whole case and the discussion about it - please keep it in fellowships or in private messages, but not here in open boards! what would interested new players think???

It's a peculiar mail. The use of "arse", "butchers" and "bloody" rather overdoes the Britishness, particularly as the expression "guess what arse" is quite un-British, as is the use of "loser" in the subject. One definitely senses some kind of put-up job.

I want you all to know that the matter of the insulting e-mail received by Ed Trice is under investigation. There is a player in the website with a user name similar to that of the sender of the e-mail. It is possible that these two individuals are one and the same. To my knowledge the individual in question is not a moderator. At this point it has been determined elsewhere that the sender of the e-mail was not Stevie. I wanted to clarify this, simply because it would be unfair to blame Stevie for something he did not do.

because it was "anonymous", rendering the identity absolutely correct to anyone who speculates about it.

What reason is there to believe the message was from a "mod"?

I strongly agree with you George. If one of the Mods is speaking out of place then perhaps he/she should be barred from BK. Fencer should have to answer to this.

We should write to Fencer to clarify this.........
If it's true then is one of the most dummy decisions he could make!!!! But even if it's true i think we can change his opinion.....

Guess what arse? fencer agrees with me, have a
butchers!

Fencer (hide) 23. January 2005, 09:42:26 I don't
see anybody being unfairly moderated. Reply


Even better, now he is deleting your arse from BK and
your bloody game as well!! Mess with the mod and you
die!







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EdTrice: Really? Now, then brainking will not be very attractive for me ...

But I do not believe it ...

I received an anonymous email from a moderator (probably "Stevie") claiming that Fencer will remove Gothic Chess from this site and I will be banned. Just thought you all should know.

The first one who will post at
BrainKing.com discussion board and only there, the correct answers to the above 3 questions, will win a 6 Month Rook membership............

The 3 questions are here.


***If there are no answers or any correct one until the same day next week, there will be no winner.......
***In the extremely rare case when there will be 2 or more correct answers at the exactly same time, the winner will be the one whose post will appear first at the BrainKing.com discussion board.

Walter Montego: Whoops, sorry Walter. I didn't mean to misquote you.

Yes, easy to learn and easy to do are indeed different things - I know since that's been part of my job for years!

Is Gothic Chess harder to learn to play well than regular chess? Probably yes. But, IMHO, only at the moment. But I don't think that's anything inherent in the game itself. The reason regular chess is so easy to learn to play well is that we're standing on the shoulders of giants, giants that have been publicised widely. I believe that once literature on Gothic Chess has been widely published and has been written about in many ways - by master strategists, wily tacticians, friendly starting-off tutors and the like - it will be as easy to learn as regular chess.

Stormerne: You left out a word in your quote of mine. "Well"
I said it's a lot harder to play this game well compared to regular Chess. I didn't mean to imply that it is any harder to learn how to play it. That's two different things. As an example, tic tac toe is only slightly easier to learn than 5 in line, but which game is harder to get good at?
I also know of games that are hard to learn, but are relatively easy to get good at. Cribbage comes to mind.

... reminds me to Janus where I am not good at all. Janus players appear mostly strong to me even if their rating is low. I don´t like the strong bishop arrow effects too much.

FRC 960 is introduced. It will make brainking.com more popular. I will feel homeless in that game, but I am sure it is fantastic for some uf us.

The reason why chess games often end up in draws is because it has been studied so much. Any standard opening book will now show openings analyzed to over 20 moves. Grandmasters spend a lot of time memorizing opening lines and variations. This type of play is not appealing to the average player because it requires lenghty study and a lot of memory work. Even middle game setups are now analyzed in great detail, and often openings are studied along the lines of "white has a slight advantage that could give a win, while black plays to try to draw the game". Gothic chess does not have such lengthy analysis of openings, but there is already an "opening book" and it is part of the programming in Gothic Vortex. Of course the opening book is not widely available, unless you buy the program and bother to write the openings as you play them against the computer. As openings are analyzed to even deeper numbers of moves, other variants will beomce more popular. Gothic chess will be one of them, along with Janus, loop and other random variants of chess.

tedbarber: why not playing a draw? when i am good in a match or tournament i often offer draw in positions which are a little bit better.
but the most opponent rejected these offers and i almost won.
i play many draws, but not short. alomost 20-30 moves. thats ok in my opinion.
to play draw is ok.

Draws to me are a waste of my time;I always play to win. Draws are absolutely unsatisfying and I consider them much worse than a defeat.

Caissus: You make me think of another question. In the future, if GC does grow, there'll probably be players who start on GC and then migrate to chess. (I bet everybody here has gone the other way so far.) But if and when that does happen, I wonder what their opinions of chess will be and how they will justify such a transition?

Don't get me wrong... I actually like Gothic Chess! And I think it will succeed up to a point, though not necessarily for the reasons surrounding draws as stated in the Ed's paper. I'd like to be upfront about why it's a good game, and I think it's got a slightly better chance of public success if the thing about the draws is NOT pushed as it has been in the past.

Stormerne: Although I am a fan of GC I must say that for many beginners in chess it would be better first to become a better chessplayer and then to learn the more complicated game of GC with his two more pieces and the bigger board.

Stormene,you are right with your opinion, many (good) chessplayers have said to to me: "Why should I play this bigger chessgame,if I am so a bad player in the original chess?"
(Mostly the good chessplayers know that they play bad, and mostly the bad players are thinking that they play good :-)).

I don`t think that GC will become the mainstream of chess in the near future, it is a really interesting game but it will be only a game for a few and not for many! It has to do with the patent and with the fact that chess itsself is not solved.

Gothic Chess is not (felt, when playing) more complex, it´s both infinite, but GC is broader. in the same moment Chess 64 is deeper. It´s harder to follow a good game as visitor. At the beginning I felt the same as you. But now I can blow away the very most all-games-players on this server even when sleeping despite I am only a tournament ELO 1580 Chess Player (this is about 2000 typically claimed ELO-points in chess forums). I would claim Gothic Chess is more like real life, the thoughts are not too abstract and freaky, it´s all about mobility despite the tactics can overwhelme somebody at the beginning. But if both players have the same level (round about) then they will see both the same things, Gothic Chess is often much easier than the deep, deep game of chess that looks so plain compared to GC. I stopped playing chess some years ago, all those eager boys bored me, whyever, I play Gothic, I hope it gets en vogue. Maybe chess is better, but it´s not attractive for me to look for a weak pawn all he time.

Walter Montego: You say, "It's a lot harder for people to play this game compared to regular Chess." If that is this case, won't that restrict the numbers who take up Gothic Chess? I'm well aware that Ed's business model is that his variant will become the mainstream version. But if what you say is true then it won't happen. The reason that people DON'T play regular Chess at the moment is not because it doesn't give them sufficient challenge! For many it's too complex already.

Walter, i wanted to reply but you just said exactly all my thoughts. Nothing to add.......

Stormerne: I hadn't given it much thought. This Gothic Chess has less draws I'd be willing to bet. And I'm sure it's because there's more power on the board, but the King is the same piece as in regular Chess. You also have to take into consideration that not very many people play this game, nor are there hundreds of years of study of it even though it's been around for over a hundred. Not quite set up as this, but the same pieces and rules. It's just nobody much played Bird's Chess, nor fifty years later did they played Capablnca's Chess. Now there's Gothic Chess, and it is more widely played of the three, but still it quite small compared to regular Chess. If the patent holder is right and Gothic Chess does become the mainstream version of Chess in a few years, all those millions of players will produce lots of good players and I imagine the percentage of draws will go up. It's a lot harder for people to play this game well compared to regular Chess. I'm sure that lowers the amount of draws too. One thing that is changing all Chess type games is computers. I'm sure if Gothic Chess does get popular with the masses, more computer time will be put into the study of it. With computers getting more powerful everyday, they'll catch up to this game a lot faster than it took them to almost master regular Chess.

As I understand it, part of the raison d’être for the creation of Gothic Chess was to reduce the proportion of draws. Certainly in modern grandmaster chess there are very many draws. But is this necessarily a bad thing? I want to challenge that notion.

It is true that at the highest levels draws are very common. But who does this matter to? Does it matter to the grandmasters? Or, if we are honest, does it really matter more to us, the spectators, the readers of chess journals, the Class A to Class D players that populate the chess clubs throughout the world? We like the action. We like to see a win. But how do the players feel about it?

Here’s my honest opinion. I’m a serious club player, currently restarting chess after a gap of more than a decade, and if I look at the games I’ve played over the years in matches, leagues and tournaments, which games have given me the greatest satisfaction? Very definitely, the games I have enjoyed most have been the hard fought draws. For me there is a much greater satisfaction in the struggle with a worthy opponent where both are really trying to win but that eventually ends in impasse, than my taking advantage of some blunder and getting a slightly hollow victory.

Chess games at the level of the great masses are lost rather than won, and a draw can often show that both players played well. So why would I be interested in a chess variant that claimed to reduce the possibility of my enjoying what for me are the best kind of games? If the game doesn’t stand on its own two feet and instead has to compare itself to its parent to justify its existence then it’s a poor kind of game.

Nasmichael: Thank you! I am doing my job and hope in a well way.
Every evening i will update games and results. if someone finds errors in games (pgn, online) please send me a message or a mail to info@gothicchess.at

by the way: i will add english in general as a language of gothicchess.at too. why that? because some people asked me ...

I went to gothicchess.at and saw some of the games at the tournament on 01/15/2005 and was quite pleased to see that the option exists for looking at several "live" games as they are progressing. Some are complete; it is good to see the gamescores and play through the games. Well done!

Sorry, it seems to be impossible to display such pictures directly. (Janus = Archbishop)

http://www.chessbox.de/Compu/schachveri1_e.html

It looks like a diseased wolf to me.

I am schachmdmt from Vienna and I am following up the big tournament at my homepage http://www.gothicchess.at/ .
There you can watch the sections, games (comments planned; online you can replay themoutside of brainking) and so on. Klick on the main menu point "Trice's Turnier (DE)" for using german language , "Trice's Tourn. (ENG)" for english.I am planning pages about the players with games too. If you want, you can send me a pic or text or annotations or whatever interesting to

info@gothicchess.at

Please help me by sending finished results, games, annotations and so on!

Yours sincerely

schachmdmt

Dresden: have a look at http://www.gothicchess.at/ - i am building up the tournament revival there.

http://brainking.com/game/Tournaments?trg=6703&tri=25674&trnst=0

Watchers don´t need to be logged in.

I gave him some tips how to play. Maybe he can need it. ;-)

<Or does knopp just have the same name ? ;-)
I accepted the challenge and my plan is to totally destroy his positions to make him love Gothic Chess. >:-) I had a last chess tournament rating of ELO 1600, so probably I will ask somebody for help. It can be higher now, but still too low, I am afraid.

... ... and that appears as rare nowadays ... ~*~ ...

Walter Montego:

Caissus: He's blurry, all right! He snuck out of the yard last night and didn't come home until feeding time this morning. Bad boy! :)
Maybe it's those Dalmation spots on him that makes him look that way.

I think the previous icon is also a little bit blurred ?

Chessmaster1000: If we could pick the icons, then you could keep using it and I could switch. The best of both worlds, eh?

This is a good idea that the user picks the symbol.
For me the current Janus piece icon is very funny and whenever i look at it my feelings change positive!
So i like the piece......
I also find its smile smirking, like it makes fun of us playing the game......

But look the Janus piece again! Look it's smiling with so much silliness that it should make you laugh!! It's a damn of a piece for me!

Caissus: That's it Caissus. I think both look a lot better than what we have now. The Cardinal is exactly the piece itself. Do you think they'd be easy to tell apart from the Knights on the same board? If so, are there others that feel as I do about the doglike thing and can we get fencer to change the symbol? If it's just me, it probably not worth the trouble. Or maybe it can be made so that the user picks the style of symbol on his page as he does with the rest of the Chess board set up?

http://caissus.gmxhome.de/WJanus.jpg
http://caissus.gmxhome.de/BJanus.jpg
http://caissus.gmxhome.de/bcardinal.jpg
http://caissus.gmxhome.de/wcardinal.jpg