FICS Monthly Newsletter

What's New? - FICS would like to welcome the 1,480 new players that have joined the server in the month of June. Among the highlights in this month's newsletter is the Lightning 1 0 Festival, links to major world events like the World Open. Other news items include the Frankfurt Chess Classic 2000, Xie Jun vs. The World and updates for the 1999-2000 FICS Grand Prix. Be sure to read the rest of the July monthly newsletter for more FICS news items and other chess related information. Plus, don't forget to check out the link to our previous Newsletter issues, July 1999 to present. You may find a lot of useful information in our previous newsletter's 'Server Tip of the Month' sections.

Come meet the faces behind the kibitzing! 1 0 players haven't had the chance to vent their rage over-the-board in the U.S. yet, and there have been no East Coast FICS gatherings. This July, let's change all that!

The idea was to find a place that fit everyone, participants will provide their own sets, boards, clocks, food, and lodging. No contribution will be asked. The Tournament and Facilities are Free. We'll play as many 1 0 games as we can manage (and no one will be axed for longer time controls), and maybe hold for-fun tournaments, lectures, or clock-simuls (if anyone wants to do the preparation).

Where: Harrisburg State Hospital Grounds, Pavilion; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
When: weekend of July 29 - July 30, 2000
Facilities include: Open Pavilion, 15 Picnic Tables, 2 Outdoor Grills, Men/Women's Restrooms, Ice Machine, Running Water.
The official website for this event is at: http://bs.faithweb.com/hs/.

Please address questions and/or suggestions to afw or Obliviax on FICS.

The World Open takes place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from June 28th-July 4th 2000. The world's biggest open tournament with a $200,000 US Dollar guaranteed prize fund! There are seven sections playing nine rounds. The main open section entries include: Georgy Timoshenko, Alex Fishbein, Alexander Goldin, Maurice Ashley, Viktor Bologan, John Fedorowicz, Gilberto Hernandez, Patrick Hummel, Gregory, Kaidanov, Anna Kahn, Boris Kreiman, Larry Christiansen, Artashes Minasian, Anatoly Lein, Ron Burnett, Boris Stripunsky, Alexander Wojtkiewicz, Pawel Blatny, Ilia Smirin and Vladimir Epishin. Check back next month for final updates.

**** Major Events ****

The Dortmund Super-Tournament will be played July 7th-16th 2000. Top Players around the world will be participating for a showdown which will include the top computer program "Junior 6". Human players include: Kramnik, Leko, Anand, Khalifman, and Adams.

The 53rd Russian Chess Championships were played in Samara, June 16th-27th 2000. The event was an 11 round Swiss system tournament. Vadim Zvjaginsev was the top rated player in a field 62 players which included 34 GMs, and 18 IMs. Sergey Volkov placed first with 8 points of a possible 11, a half-point above second place which was shared by five players.

After 52 rounds of competition in the total length of 104 days. I announce that Miss Xie Jun has won the online chess match of "Xie Jun vs. the World". -- Li Feng (Referee)

A Chinese Website organized a match against Xie Jun. Unfortunately, the world team resigned! The game history as well as other information can be found at:http://chess.lotof.com/index_e.asp.

Some of the world's best chess talents competed at the Frankfurt Chess Classic. Events include: The Fujitsu Siemens Giants, Masters, Computer exhibition matches, two simuls and two Fischer Random Chess exhibition games.

Details can be found at the official website: http://www.frankfurt-west.de/ChessClassic2000/ .

Other information about this event can also be found at the website "This Week In Chess", which has Interviews with Kasparov, Ivanchuk, Bareev, Topalov and Adams and lots of video coverage of the event. This coverage can be found at: http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/event/ffcc2000/franksim.html

The 1999-2000 FICS Grand Prix! This is a 'standard tournament' competition that extends throughout the entire year and keeps score based on scheduled standard tourneys run on FICS. The FICS Grand Prix cycle lasts 52 weeks: Tuesday, September 21, 1999 through Monday, September 18, 2000. During the course of these 52 weeks, a number of Grand Prix events will be held. At the end of the year there is a $150.00 (US Dollars) guaranteed prize fund. You will find information for frequently asked questions, events listings, standings and a complete player list on the Grand Prix website at: http://www.angelfire.com/wi/EscapeArtist/FICSGrandPrix/index.html

Note: Due to some problems with the FICSGrandPrix website host, there will be a delay in July's posting. Updates will be done as soon as possible. We apologize for the delay.

The top three participants in a field of 334 players are listed here, bigbad maintains the lead!

Rank	Name	GP Points	# of events	1st place	2nd place	3rd place
1	bigbad	3200.85	82	23	28	14
2	SGV	1903.28	32	17	2	11
3	Knightnite	1480.12	27	15	6	4

(The following point totals reflect events posted as of the publication date of this newsletter.)

**** FICS Tournaments ****

"Nightly 5 0" tournaments: These are tournaments held every night at 10:00 PM server time. As the name implies, they are played with a 5 0 time control and the tournament is a 5-round Swiss paired event. At the end of the week an overall Champion for the week is crowned, and a FICS news item is posted with the winners name. There is also an U1600 title and an upset title. The titles are awarded each week, and are included on the weekly news items. You do not have to participate every night to win titles.

The Nightly is an open tourney and all are encouraged to participate. The tourneys also last a little over 1 hr so plan ahead! For more information, contact timp online or message him. You may also find more information on the Nightly web page at http://freechess.cjb.net.

Suicide on Saturdays (SOS): The SOS (Suicide On Saturdays) is a tournament run each week on FICS by WarHawk(TM). The tournament is held every Saturday at 10:00 am server time (CST). The score is kept for each player who plays in 1 or more tournaments. The weekly tournament is a 5 0 Swiss consisting of 5 rounds. There is also a quarterly Suicide Championship held for all qualifying participants in the previous three months. Lastly, there will be an Annual Suicide Championship 4 player 5 0 double round robin! The quarterly championships will be a qualification tournament for the annual tournament.

To qualify for a quarterly tournament, you must be in the top 4 scores in the over 1800 section or top 2 from the under 1800 section. If a player is forced to withdraw or is unable to attend, a wildcard slot will be available to the next qualified player from their division. The winner of the under 1800 section gets a lesson from Haley (2344). More information about this event may be obtained by e-mailing timp(TM), contacting him on FICS, or visit the SOS web site at http://www.kingscourt.cjb.net/.

**** The Chess Academy ****

The FICS Chess Academy provides a medium for the interaction between strong and weaker chess players. Chess advisors, designated by the symbol (CA), donate their time to help weaker counterparts in order to share their knowledge. The most common event is semi-formal analysis of games or positions. There will also be lectures, master challenge sessions, guided group analysis of GM games, and more! Instructors are master or candidate master (expert) strength players and are enthusiastic about helping others improve their chess.

To receive instruction or otherwise participate in the Chess Academy, you should follow these steps:

Use tells to channel 65 during the Academy Hours ('tell 65 I don't understand the Lucena position'). Chess advisers will have (CA) after their handles.

Academy proceedings start in channel 65, but often "follow (CA Lecturer)" is used while examining a game or position. Prepare your questions and interesting games before the Chess Academy hour starts. Game submissions for analysis are welcome, and should be e-mailed to academy@freechess.org and/or saved in your journal, accompanied by a message to Academy.

* Every Sunday at 15:00 server time, the Chess Academy will hold
Special events such as: team games, simuls and master events.

**** New Players ****

A total of 1,480 new player accounts have been created for the month of June.
Currently to date, FICS total size is 67,461 player accounts.
Active accounts in the month of June totaled 11,387.

**** Server Tip of the Month ****

July's Server Tip of the Month
is to provide a summary of the
alias setup process on FICS and how it works.

Sets up a command alias so that "word" is equivalent to typing "string". If"string" is omitted then the current value of "word" is displayed. If both parameters are omitted, then all of your aliases are displayed.

Here are some sample aliases that may be useful to you. They are listed here in order to
give you some idea of what is possible. Try getting ideas from other users as well.

There are many system aliases that everyone has by default; you do not need
to set them up, they are already there. Here is the list:

a	accept	p	who a	stats	statistics
b	backward	players	who a	t	tell
bye	quit	re	refresh	v	variables
cs	cshout	res	resign	w	who
e	examine	saa	simallabort	znot	znotify
exit	quit	sab	simabort	.	tell .
f	finger	sadj	simadjourn	,	tell ,
h	help	saadj	simalladjourn	!	shout
hi	history	seek	seeking	:	it
logout	quit	setup	bsetup	#	whisper
m	match	sh	shout	*	kibitz
mam	xtell mamer	sn	simnext	?	help
more	next	sp	simprev	+	addlist
n	next	setup	bsetup	-	sublist

Other system aliases are added from time to time.
The help files for the different commands will have the most updated information.

WARNING:
Be careful to avoid using an alias that can also stand for another commands
on the server. For example, "fg" could be a chess move (for f-pawn X g-pawn),
so don't have "fg" be an alias. For similar reasons, it would not be best to
use "t" as an alias since it is already assigned as an alias for "tell". You
could do so, of course; but then you would not be able to use the system alias
for tell unless you unalias your alias.

(a) Aliases can use the "@" wildcard symbol and thus save you a lot of
typing for routine statements or requests. For example, using the "mbl" alias,
you would type "mbl Shane" and execute the same command as if you had typed
"match Shane 5 12".

(c) You may not create an alias for the quit command, or for the unalias command.

(d) if you have an alias that goes something like "tell @ hi there", you can
substitute the '@' with a name or a channel (or with '.' and ',' to tell to
the last person or last channel you addressed). Sometimes it may be useful to
send the aliased tell to 'shout' or 'cshout', which can be done using 'tell !'
and 'tell ^'. Supposing your alias for the above example is 'hi', you can now
type 'hi !' to effectively shout "hi there".

(e) The command "unalias" removes your personal alias for 'word'. This alias will no longer be in use. This command will not, however, remove default aliases.

If you should you have any problems with our 'Server Tip' that you cannot resolve,
please email support@freechess.org for assistance.

It's a great way to locate other helpful "Tip of the Month" sections
and older news highlights that were covered in past issues.

We are currently looking for users who want to help us in promoting FICS.
Among things, we are working on is to get the FICS Banner on your local
chess club and personal web pages. If you have time and want to help us
then send an e-mail to binford@freechess.org.

Please send comments and feedback on what you would like to see in future editions.
Edited by: afw and Oxymoron.

Day	Server Time	Academy Event
Monday	13:00	Group Analysis
Wednesday	15:00	Group Analysis
Thursday	7:00 21:00	Group Analysis Group Analysis
Saturday	15:00	Group Analysis
Sunday	15:00	Special Events*

"alias"	-- lists all of your aliases
"alias word"	-- gives your alias for "word"
"alias word string"	-- creates/updates an alias for you so that typing
"word" becomes equivalent to typing "string".
Use the "unalias" command to remove an alias.
"unalias word"	--removes a set alias

fun	say Fun game!
gg	say Good game!
gm	say Good move!
idle	set busy is busy. Please 'message' to contact him.
mbl	match @ 5 12
mood1	set formula f2 & f4
ms	match @ 10 10
ps	who as
pw	who aw
ty	say Thank you for the game.
w4	match @ 10 10 0 0 wild 4
wave	it waves to @

Welcome to the World of Chess!

What's New !!!

Major Events

FICS Tournaments

The Chess Academy

New Players

Server Tip of the Month