Comments by TonyQuintanilla

Mike Adams' replies with news in the best spirit of David Pritchard's
legacy (Mike's Chess club page is at: http://www.guildfordchess.fsnet.co.uk/),

'Dear Tony

Thanks for this. I have just returned from the Hastings International -
last night on New Years eve we held an evening variants tournament in
memory of David. We played 8 different 5 min variants, which attracted an
entry of 17, won jointly by IM Andew Greet and Jack Rudd.

Best wishes

Mike Adams'

John Brown writes,

'Hi Tony,

I've just began work on the Third Edition edition of Meta-Chess, which I
hope to have in stock by 03.31.06. It will be very similar to E-2 but with
errors corrected and the writing improved. Feel free to post this if you
like.

Happy New Year,

John William Brown'

How about a new volunteer?!

Very nice. Interesting. I may also help to pair players, finding fair
partners and also more challenging ones. Of course, the wide variety of
variants makes this rating less 'firm' than chess ratings. 

I think that Gary's suggestion to allow a game to be rated or not would
be a nice addition. This could be a choice made at the start of the game,
allong with time controls, etc. This would also allow some players to
develop rated 'niches', such as Shogi, or Shatranj-variants, while
playing other games 'just for fun.' Some may just want to be rated
generalists. Others may not want to be rated at all.

No. Checkmate has to be proven.

ZOG does not have ply-setting, however, you can set the amount of time that
the program will evaluate the position. This is indirectly reflected in the
number of plies that are processed, although it depends on the CPU, of
course. (Not to stir the pot, but out of sincere and friendly curiosity,
why use a 2.5 MB RAM CPU when computers and memory are relatively cheap
now?)

Thanks Michael for the kind comments. I have now posted the ZRF. Yes, I've
played it against ZOG to test the game mechanics, unfortunately ZOG plays
this game very poorly. 

I also hope that the game plays well! But I'll have to wait for a human opponent!

ZOG vastly overvalues moves to the intersections. I considered multiplying
'add''s for standard moves, but even with 3 adds, it did not alter
ZOG's priorities (besides making you choose between multiple identical
moves, which is annoying), so I abandoned this approach. As with many
games that significantly alter movement structure, ZOG is mostly useful to
test the game mechanics and to play by e-mail.

The editors received the following message by e-mail from Namig Aliyev:

Dear sir!
I would like send to You some comments about Grand Chess.
 
1.'Fool mat' in classic chess is 
1.f4 -e6
2.g4 -Qh4x -2 moves
 
2.In Capablanca chess for opening set up like this (Optimal set up,all
pawns protekted,force line of pieces very good
balanced)-R-N-B-A-C-K-Q-B-N-R, 'fool mat' is
1.c3 -h5
2.Ac2 -f6
3.Ag6x -3 moves
 
3.In Grand Chess for opening set up -3rd row pawns,2nd row from square b2
-N-B-A-C-K-Q-B-N, 1st row Ra1 and Rj1 (this variant more
preferable,because white king snand up in dark square and vice versa)
'fool mat 'is 
1.c4 -Rjg10
2.Ac3 -Rae10
3.Cf4 -Af10
4.Nh4 -h7
5.Ag7x -5 moves
 These examples shows us in Grand Chess a king is more safety position
then in Capablanca or Classic Chess.
 
P.S.I think all rules in Grand Chess is very interesting and good. But if
we make one exceptoin it will be better.
Rule:A pawn can be promoted when it reaches 9th row. The promotion is
optional on these rows.
In this case I think many chess fun and players will be joined to this
beatiful game.
With best regards, FIDE Master,FIDE Trainer Namik

Interesting setup. 

It looks like you created a Game Courier preset for the setup diagram. 

It would be nice if you could add a preset button to your page? To do
this, copy the HTML form code for the preset button into your page HTML.
You can see to code at the bottom of the 'Editing a Preset' page, in a
window just above 'Available Pieces.'