ChessBomb Blog

Which analysis mode do you prefer? Vote here!

2010-11-28T05:56:00.001+02:00

Currently the automated computer analysis on ChessBomb uses the so-called MultiPV mode. This means that multiple principal variations are explored and shown, in our case the 4 best ones. This is how it looks:

It has been proposed, and we are seriously considering it, to switch to SinglePV mode - i.e. only exploring and showing the single best principal variation according to the engine. Since this ultimately affects you, our visitors, we are leaving the decision in your hands, via the poll below. Here is a brief summary of the advantages and disadvantages of both options:

SinglePV advantages:

Engines are much stronger in SinglePV mode than in MultiPV mode. This is because they don't waste time exploring suboptimal positions, and also because some powerful optimizations are only enabled in SinglePV mode (e.g. aspiration windows). And when we say "much stronger", we really do mean "much". According to our internal testing, Stockfish 1.9.1 in SinglePV mode is about 230 Elo points stronger than in MultiPV=4 mode.
For people who are new to computer chess, having more than one variation is confusing. They will often start arguing that the engine is useless because it shows bad moves, which usually sends our blood pressure through the roof :)
A single analysis line occupies less screen space than four. More room for the chat box, yay!

MultiPV advantages:

Having analysis for more than one move is useful. For example, it's common to ask yourself "why not move X here?", and when X is among the 4 best moves, you get that answer.
Sometimes you can feel smarter than the engine.

Vote here and help us decide:

Carlsen, Anand, Polgar, Hammer - Live from Arctic Securities Chess Stars 2010

2010-08-28T02:05:00.000+03:00

Magnus Carlsen, Viswanathan Anand, Judit Polgar, and Jon Ludvig Hammer are the stars in the Arctic Securities Chess Stars 2010 rapid tournament. It is a double round robin played from 28 (Saturday) to 30 August (Monday) 2010. Here is the full games schedule:

Saturday:
Round 1 14:30 CET Polgar, J - Carlsen, M; Anand, V - Hammer, J
Round 2 16:00 CET Polgar, J - Anand, V; Carlsen, M - Hammer, J
Round 3 17:30 CET Hammer, J - Polgar, J; Anand, V - Carlsen, M

Sunday:
Round 4 14:30 CET Carlsen, M - Polgar, J; Hammer, J - Anand, V
Round 5 16:00 CET Anand, V - Polgar, J; Hammer, J - Carlsen, M
Round 6 17:30 CET Polgar, J - Hammer, J; Carlsen, M - Anand, V

Monday:
Final 14:00 CET

All games will be shown live exclusively on ChessBomb!

Bazna Kings 2010

2010-06-14T13:25:00.000+03:00

The 4th edition of the Kings Tournament is held in Bazna, in the heart of Transylvania, June 14 - June 25. The tournament is part of the Grand Slam and with the average participants rating of 2742 (XX category) it is the strongest one this year.

The most intriguing player is the world number 1, the Norwegian GM Magnus Carlsen (2813). The other players are the former World Champion GM Ruslan Ponomariov, the World Cup winner GM Boris Gelfand, the Chinese star GM Wang Yue, GM Teimour Radjabov and the former European Champion Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu.

The system used is double round-robin. Each round the ChessBomb live broadcast starts at 12:30 GMT except for the last one, starting 2 hours earlier.

Meanwhile, after the end of Poikovsky 2010 we are broadcasting two other exciting tournaments. The last year Bazna winner GM Vassily Ivanchuk is in Cuba and is part of the Capablanca Memorial. The young starts GM Ivan Cheparinov and GM Fabiano Caruana fight for the win with 6 other players at the Ruy Lopez Festival.

Sigeman & Co Chess Tournament

2010-05-25T23:45:00.003+03:00

Only a day after the exciting final of the US Championship and two after Astrakhan GP, ChessBomb begins to follow 18th annual Sigeman & Co Chess Tournament. The classical Hipp Theater in central Malmo hosts the tournament for thirteenth time. Six players will fight in a round-robin, starting on May 26. Games begin at 11:00 GMT, except for the last round, starting 2 hours earlier. GM Anish Giri (Holland, 2642) is the top seeded and the youngest (15 years old) participant. The other and not less intriguing players are: GM Jon Ludvig Hammer (Norway, 2610), GM Jonny Hector (Sweden, 2609), GM Tiger Hillarp Persson (Sweden, 2542), GM Pia Cramling (Sweden, 2536) and IM Nils Grandelius (Sweden, 2476). As usual, the broadcast will be accompanied by Stockfish's expert opinion.

U.S. Chess Championship 2010

2010-05-17T05:21:00.002+03:00

The 2010 U.S. Chess Championship is currently underway (May 13 - May 25). All games are broadcasted live on ChessBomb. Each round starts at 19:00 GMT, except the possible tie break on May 25, which is at 15:00 GMT.

Astrakhan Grand-Prix 2010

2010-05-10T13:37:00.002+03:00

The final FIDE Grand-Prix tournament is held from 9th to 25th May in Astrakhan, Russia. The second qualifier for the Candidates Matches 2010-2011 after Levon Aronian will become clear. Games will be played in round robin format starting on May 10th, while 15th and 20th May are rest days. The participants are:

Vladimir Akopian (Armenia 2694)
Evgeny Alekseev (Russia 2700)
Pavel Eljanov (Ukraine 2751)
Vugar Gashimov (Azerbaijan 2734)
Boris Gelfand (Israel 2741)
Ernesto Inarkiev (Russia 2669)
Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine 2741)
Dmitry Jakovenko (Russia 2725)
Peter Leko (Hungary 2735)
Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (Azerbaijan 2763)
Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukraine 2733)
Teimour Radjabov (Azerbaijan 2740)
Peter Svidler (Russia 2735)
Wang Yue (China 2752)

The Games will be broadcast live on ChessBomb.com every playing day at 11:00 GMT. The most intriguing games will have unlimited analysis for our premium members.

ChessBomb Premium - Free for Everyone this Saturday

2010-04-30T23:27:00.006+03:00

Tomorrow (Saturday, 1 May 2010) we will temporarily upgrade everyone's account to Extra Premium status during the game (round 6 of the Anand-Topalov match). Here's a gentle reminder about the additional features you will experience during this demo:

Ad-free interface
Unlimited analysis time (unleashing the full power of Stockfish)
Unrestricted chat
PGN file download

Even non-registered guest visitors will see unlimited analysis time and no ads. So jump on board, and bring friends as well :) These features are normally available starting from € 1.99 / month.

There are a couple of caveats, however:

We expect the chat to become almost unusable due to the tremendous message flood. You will see why the restrictions we have in place are necessary :) Unfortunately, the chat room paradigm is not designed for many thousands simultaneous posters in a single room.

ChessBomb moderator at work tomorrow

The Premium features put the server infrastructure under greater stress. When enabled for everyone, the stress is significant. So small disasters are possible... although we expect to hold well.

Main ChessBomb server after tomorrow

Now please excuse us while we run to prepare our poor little servers for this torture ;-)

ChessBomb Premium Goes Live

2010-04-24T17:09:00.000+03:00

We are proud to introduce for you several new features, in time for the Topalov-Anand World Chess Championship Match in Sofia 2010. First, rest assured - all our previous features remain free, just like before. However, starting today we are offering several new Premium features, for a small fee (as low as € 1.99 per month).

Here are the benefits available to the owners of our new Premium Accounts:

Advertisment-free interface.
Infinite analysis of the last played move. In this manner you can enjoy the full power of our preferred engine Stockfish (which is dethroning Rybka 3 from the top spot in various rating lists) with regular updates for the current position.
Unrestricted chat - premium accounts are not subject to the 10 messages per minute limitation.
PGN file download of every game.

See detailed comparison and upgrade your account here.

Anand-Topalov World Chess Championship match live on ChessBomb.com

2010-04-22T02:59:00.011+03:00

Today (April 21, 2010) the official opening of the most anticipated chess event of the year took place in Sofia, Bulgaria - the match for the world title between champion Viswanathan Anand and the challenger ex-champion Veselin Topalov. The clash of the titans will start on the board one day later than originally planned. The postponenement was due to the long trip of Vishy Anand to Sofia caused by the volcano in Iceland. So the first game is scheduled for Saturday, April 24 2010 12:00 GMT (15:00 EEST).

The ChessBomb team is working hard to bring you the best online coverage of this great and long expected match. The realtime analysis will be provided by the awesome Stockfish engine, which we additionally tweaked and upgraded to the latest 1.7.1 version (it has already dethroned Rybka 3 from the first place on some lists, for example CCRL FRC). As you may recall, we recently replaced Rybka 2.2 with Stockfish.

Stay tuned for some additional great announcements from us before the start of the games...

ChessBomb upgrades analysis engine

2010-03-23T05:01:00.003+02:00

Until now, the automatic analysis on ChessBomb.com was provided by the Rybka 2.2n2 engine. The time has come, however, to replace it with a better one. We evaluated several of the current top engines, according to the following criteria:

playing strength
compatibility with our infrastructure
clear legal status

Our final choice is Stockfish 1.6.3. It is currently the second strongest unambiguously legal chess engine, beaten slightly only by Rybka 3. However, Stockfish can utilize the resources of our analyzing platform better than Rybka, gaining a few more ELO points in the process.

In the end, we estimate that this change adds about 150 ELO points to the ChessBomb analysis strength. The improvement is most obvious in endgames.

Melody Amber 2010

2010-03-11T22:33:00.006+02:00

The 19th Amber Blindfold and Rapid tournament takes place in Nice from March 13 (first round) to March 25 (last round). The 12 participants according to their ELO are:

Magnus Carlsen – Norway (2813)
Vladimir Kramnik - Russia (2790)
Levon Aronian – Armenia (2782)
Alexander Grischuk – Russia (2756)
Peter Svidler – Russia (2750)
Boris Gelfand – Israel (2750)
Vasily Ivanchuk - Ukraine (2748)
Vugar Gashimov – Azerbaijan (2740)
Ruslan Ponomariov – Ukraine (2737)
Sergey Karjakin - Russia (2725)
Leinier Dominguez – Cuba (2713)
Jan Smeets – The Netherlands (2651)

Every day four sessions will be played - two blindfold and two rapid, starting at 13:30 GMT. Exceptions are the rest days, which are March 17 and 22, and the last round, which starts at 11:30 GMT. The rate of play is 25/10 for the rapid and 25/20 for the blindfold.

The ChessBomb team will broadcast this attractive chess event with the expert commentary of Rybka.

EICC 2010

2010-03-05T21:36:00.005+02:00

11th European Individual Chess Championship men and women March 5 – 19 2010 is the next big chess event that is going to be broadcasted at ChessBomb. The tournament is held in Rijeka - Croatia and the playing days are March 6-12, March 14-17, games start at 14:30 GMT. The tiebreaks are scheduled for March 18 at 9:00 GMT. Over 200 GMs are expected to compete for the title, among them are: Almasi Zoltan HUN 2720, Bacrot Etienne FRA 2714, Movsesian Sergei SVK 2709, Adams Michael ENG 2704, Caruana Fabiano ITA 2680, etc. Follow the live games here.

Linares 2010

2010-02-11T15:50:00.017+02:00

This year the XXI Category Super Tournament in Linares is held from 12 Feb to 25 Feb. The participants are:

Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria) - ELO 2805
Levon Aronian (Armenia) - ELO 2781
Boris Gelfand (Israel) - ELO 2761
Vugar Gashimov (Azerbeidjan) -ELO 2759
Alexander Grischuk (Russia) - ELO 2736
Francisco Vallejo Pons (Spain) - ELO 2705

The games start at 15:00 GMT each playing day (13-16, 18-21, 23-24). Join the live broadcast with realtime Rybka analysis on ChessBomb.

Aeroflot 2010

2010-02-08T15:02:00.005+02:00

The 9th edition of the International Chess Festival Aeroflot Open 2010 is taking place in Moscow from 8 Feb to 19 Feb. The players are devided in four 9 round Swiss tournaments according to their rating. Holding on the tradition to broadcast the most interesting tournaments chessbomb.com is going to provide games from the A1 where all the players are above 2550 ELO. In the list of the participants we find The World Junior Chess Champion Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Wesley So, Gata Kamsky, Etienne Bacrot, Bu Xiangi, Ivan Cheparinov etc. The broadcasts start every day from 9 Feb at 12 GMT.

New chat rules

2009-10-08T00:38:00.003+03:00

We restricted access to the chat. Now everyone can view it, but only registered members can post messages. We will use this oportunity to also establish some rules for the chat:

- Respect others. ChessBomb has multinational audience, and different people may root for different players.

- No insults. No swearing. No profanity.

- The official language of the chat is English. Occasionally posting in another language is fine, but don't overdo it.

We don't have real-time moderation yet, but will ban accounts from the chat for repeatedly violating these rules.

P.S. The bug which caused the chat to lag (and also slow the rest of the site) should hopefully be fixed now.

Nanjing Pearl Spring 2009

2009-09-28T01:39:00.006+03:00

The very strong Nanjing Pearl Spring 2009 tournament starts today.

The list of participants:

Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria) - ELO 2813
Magnus Carlsen (Norway) - ELO 2772
Peter Leko (Hungary) - ELO 2762
Teimour Radjabov (Azerbaijan) - ELO 2757
Dmitry Jakovenko (Russia) - ELO 2742
Wang Yue (China) - ELO 2736

The games start at 7:00 AM GMT each playing day. SuperGM Rybkovich will analyze them live on ChessBomb as usual.

Hello, Biel

2009-07-19T07:03:00.004+03:00

The 42nd Biel Chess Festival starts today. Expect full broadcast coverage of the Grandmaster tournament on ChessBomb.

Many Improvements

2009-07-19T06:47:00.003+03:00

We just rolled out a big update to ChessBomb's interface and infrastructure. Here are the highlights:

Stability should be much better. No more slowdowns, disconnects, or even total crashes. And we have plans to improve it even more drastically in the near future.
The Analysis panel now shows some metadata - the name of the analysing engine, the time it spent analysing, and the depth of the analysis.
A new Standings panel in the tournament/match rooms.
Several bugs and minor inconveniences were eradicated. But don't worry - to compensate this, we probably introduced a couple of new ones.

ChessBomb servers exploded

2009-05-21T11:01:00.001+03:00

ChessBomb.com's servers were bombed yesterday during M-Tel Masters round 7. Lots of ~~terrorists~~ users ~~attacked~~ visited us simultaneously, several times more than we had prepared for. The enemy browsers were aided by a bug from one of our programmers, which caused a component of our XMPP service to eat all the RAM.

The guilty programmer will be punished with a 10-day vacation on the Black Sea coast. Meanwhile the issue is fixed, and we invite everybody to hit us again even harder =)

M-Tel Masters 2009 broadcast

2009-05-17T16:54:00.003+03:00

ChessBomb is broadcasting live all games from M-Tel Masters 2009. Rybka provides the realtime analysis.

ChessBomb Wins Contest for "Coolest Use of the jQuery UI CSS Framework"

2009-03-04T04:12:00.003+02:00

Link

We want to thank all of our participants for the time they spent working on this. In the end, it was very close, but we found Chessbomb to be the most complete use of the framework classes along with nice layout and an interesting concept. We hope this contest helped get the word out about jQuery UI's new framework and perhaps we'll hold another contest at some point down the road.

Broadcasting Linares and Topalov-Kamsky

2009-02-25T07:02:00.004+02:00

ChessBomb.com is broadcasting live the Linares 2009 chess tournament, as well as the Topalov-Kamsky 2009 World Chess Championship challenger match. Every game has realtime computer analysis by the Rybka engine.

Welcome!

2009-02-25T07:01:00.000+02:00

Welcome to ChessBomb!