The FICS SR team is glad to present:
August 1999
The FICS Great Britain Team
The FICS Great Britain team is looking for players to join the team. Volunteers are needed insetting up the FICS GB squad and playing in the next event for the team (Great Britain vs France). Players must be FICS registered to join. The GB Team is planning on running 2-3 events per year. Membership on this team does not require playing in any events, and you are not committing yourself to anything. Players who join the GB Team will receive email notification when events are open to entries. The FICS Great Britain web site: http://underworld.fortunecity.com/mdk/192
If you would like to play, and are serious, -and- have played more than 6 hours of lightning 1 0 in a sitting, contact "theblob". Premove interfaces will not be allowed in the tournament. For more information 'finger theblob' or 'message theblob' to inquire or join. Rounds will be determined by the # of players. If 10 players join, the formula will be determined along the lines of 24hrs/10players=2.4 hrs per pairing, excluding breaks. Player Obliviax has also put other related info on his web site at: http://bs.faithweb.com/blob.html .
The FIDE World Chess Championships will open
on 30th July and run until August 29th in Las Vegas, USA. First round starts on 31st
July at 17:00 server time (22:00 GMT). All rounds will start at 17:00
server time (22:00 GMT) every day except on August 20th, 21st and 25th, which are rest
days. FICS will try to broadcast all the games from Las Vegas.
More information about this event can be found at:
http://www.worldfide.com/chess/index.html
(Official FIDE website).
http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/twic.html
(The Week in Chess).
http://www.clubkasparov.ru/index0e.htm
(Club Kasparov).
Fantasy Chess will be running a
tournament to be based on the FIDE World Championships! Its FREE and takes about 2 minutes
to enter. Go and select your 8 players to represent you and cheer them on throughout the
event!
For more information visit: http://www.angelfire.com/hi/hdcachess/fantasy.html
86th British Championships relayed live on FICS
Games will be played from August 2nd
through August 13th (rest day August 8th), should there be a tie for first place there
will be a play off on the 14th. Games start at 1:15pm GMT (8:15am server time). The
playoff if it happens will be at approximately 9:00am GMT (4:00am server time).
For more information visit The British Chess Federation at: http://www.bcf.ndirect.co.uk
The Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) produced the pages for the 86th British Championships 1999.
FICS for the second year running was used to produce the live game pages that were shown on the official BCF Championships web page. FICS admin DAV was at the venue in Scarborough to ensure all ran smoothly. This is further proof that FICS is more than just a chess playing site.
So what does FICS have to do with the web pages? Well it was used to enter the Championship games (the top 4 boards) as they happened. This year it was not possible to have a connection to the Internet in the main hall, so all the entry took place in the back room. The top four boards were monitored by juniors who also updated the demo boards for the audience. As the players moved, the juniors kept two copies of the moves. Periodically the one of the score sheets was gathered and brought to the back room for entry. And yes this is was where the human effort stops and it was all over to the silicon workhorse.
The games were set up on FICS by 'examining a position from scratch' (analyzing the starting position). When the score sheets were received the moves were entered into FICS using Winboard, a graphical interface for FICS. Thus the move entry operator could see all four boards at once on the computer screen, and just moving the pieces with the mouse transferred the moves over the Internet.
At this point only users on FICS could watch the games. This is where a little magic was used (actually DAV's programming, but magic sounds cooler :). Just as players can observe games on FICS, so can computer programs. A program called Webbot was told to observe the games being entered and as a result it produced web pages of the games.
Webbot works by waiting until a move is keyed, when FICS sends it a message telling it what move was just played. Webbot keeps its own internal copy of the board and uses this information to update it. It appends the move to its move list and then just simply outputs the web page (Okay, it wasn't quite as simple as it took a long while to get the HTML correct since it uses lots of nested tables).
And that's all there is to the live coverage.
DAV (aka David Flynn) is currently a computer programmer working in the storage department (SSD) at IBM Hursley near Winchester, England. DAV is a volunteer who currently programs and helps maintain the Free Internet Chess Server (a place on the Internet where people can play chess against each other without paying a membership fee). FICS can be accessed via the instructions under quick guide on http://www.freechess.org
The 100th US OPEN CHESS TOURNAMENT!
August 10th through August 19th, 1999.
The U.S. Chess Federation and the Sands
Regency Hotel Casino Reno, Nevada will be presenting the 100th US Open Chess
Tournament. Keep up on FICS news postings for Live coverage. The Prize fund
for this tournament is $63,300.00.
Already Pre Registered are GM's: Joel
Benjamin 2662, Arthur Bisguier 2372, Pavel Blatney 2598, Walter Browne 2567, Arnold Denker
2271, John Fedorowicz 2634, Boris Gulko 2705, Dmitry Gurevich 2617, Alejandrl Hoffman
2549, Andres Rodriguez 2525, And Alex Yermolinsky 2699.
The Nightly 5 0 tourneys are 5 rounds and typically draw between 16-30 people. The
tourneys also last a little over 1 hr so plan ahead! See you there!
Check out the Nightly webpage: http://play.at/nightly
More tournament Information ? Click Here 
The FICS Chess Academy provides a medium for the interaction between strong and weaker chess players. Stronger players, designated by the symbol (CA), donate their time to help their weaker counterparts in order to share 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! In accordance with the principles by which FICS was founded, all Academy advisers volunteer their time and expertise. Instructors are users who are master or candidate master (expert) strength players and are enthusiastic about helping others.
Do you have a question on how to participate? To receive instruction or otherwise participate in the Chess Academy you should follow these steps:
The proceedings start in ch 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 emailed to academy@freechess.org and/or saved in your journal, accompanied by a message to Academy. Use tells to channel 65 during the Chess Academy Hours ('tell 65 I don't understand the Lucena position'). Chess advisers will have (CA) after their handles.
The FICS Chess Academy weekly schedule for July:
| Day | Time | Who | What |
| Mon | 3:00 | Maybegood - spurted | Group game analysis |
| Wed | 15:00 | dfgordon | Group game analysis |
| Wed | 21:00 | Babeuf | Lecture series-see What's New! |
| Thu | 07:00 | carlsbad | Group game analysis |
| Thu | 21:00 | river - death | Group game analysis |
| Sat | 15:00 | chessgod | Event |
Every Sunday at 15:00 server time, the Chess Academy will hold
special events such as: team games, simuls and master events.
The Time indicated is Server Time (GMT-5).
GM Knezevic lectures are twice every month.
All lectures will start at 12:00 server time (17:00 GMT).
The next lecture is on 12th August.
Currently to date of this Newsletter we have
the following totals for new players. FICS total size currently is 50,362.
Unfortunately, FICS went down do to a hardware failure on July 26 at 15:02
server time and service was restored July 30 at 11:12. FICS was restored from a
backup as of July 10th. This means that all accounts that were registered from July 10th
onwards have been permanently lost. Please register again at http://www.freechess.org if your account was
affected. We apologize for the inconvenience, and once again, thank you for your
patience.
*** NEWS, NEWS, NEWS ***
Would you like to find out the latest FICS information? While on-line all you have
to do is type in: news -and you will see the 10 most recent news items.
The command displays news items from the chess server bulletin board. There are four
versions of the command:
Here's a neat command: statistics; system alias "stats", Usage: statistics <handle>. Displays some statistics on players. If no name is specified it gives detailed stats on yourself, plus general info on all active players. Apart from the specified player's ratings (as in finger), you will see your ranking comapred to all, humans only, computers only; and also when your rating becomes inactive (RD < 80). Also listed are the server stats: mean (average), standard deviation (sd) for all, humans and computers, and computed overall active players in the specified category.
FICS is currently looking for users who want to help us promoting FICS.
Among things we are working on is to get the FICS Banner on your local chess club and
personal webpages. If you have time and want to help us then send email to: binford@freechess.org .
The Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) Monthly Newsletter
Please send comments and feedback on what you would like to see on
this page.
Edited by: afw(SR)(TM)
Comments to afw or TheOnlyOne.