World Chess Championship 2007 - Round 1 finished

The first round is already finished. All games ended in a draw. See the results below:

Anand - Gelfand 1/2 - 1/2
Grischnuk - Leko 1/2 - 1/2
Kramnik - Svidler 1/2 - 1/2
Morozevich - Aronian 1/2 - 1/2

So my first bet was already wrong. I did bet 1€ on Anand winning with white.

World Chess Championship 2007

Today starts the World Chess Championship in Mexico City. Vladimir Kramnik, Viswanathan Anand, Levon Aronian, Peter Leko, Peter Svidler, Boris Gelfand, Alexander Grischuk and Alexander Morozevich are fighting for the title. Most people expect a head to head race between the current champion Kra
mnik and Anand, who is leader of the ELO table. But maybe "youngster" Aronian will show more of his brilliant play.
Check the official website for updates on the tourament.

Update:
Because the official website seems to be pretty slow on updates you might want to check chessbase for regular updates on the games.

Backgammon – Opening goals

In the book "Win at backgammon" by Bill Robertie, he mentions four key goals in the opening:

Hit your opponent
Every checker you send back onto the bar gives you an advantage in the race. If your opponent has to reenter to the board he is missing valuable rolls for other things. But remember, sending a checker back at the beginning of the game might not win you the race. More important is to "steal" part of your enemies roll, so he less options to choose from and you can develop more safely.

Build blocking points
Backgammon is not a pure race. Both players do not run independently around the board. Even more affective than hitting a checker is blocking it out. If you are able to build a full prime your enemy can not move to his home board and win. Even if he hits you again and again, you have all the time to move your checkers back to where you want same to be.
Therefor building blocking points - mainly the 5- and 7- point- in the opening and blocking the backmen of your opponent is giving you a huge advantage.

Build an anchor
An anchor is a point made by your backmen in your opponent's home board. It prevents your enemy from closing the board and makes it harder from him to block your stones out of the game.

Mobilize your checkers
If you can not obtain any of this goals with your current roll make sure to mobilize your stones in a way so you have a good chance to do so in the next move. You may not be able to build a new point with each turn - well must of the time you will not be able to do so - but set up your checkers so you can easily do in later moves. Do not move your checkers from one point to the next safe point whenever possible because then you will never create new points. It is essential to leave single checkers either to move another checker there to make a point or to have more possiblities to build another point.

Next post will be about the best opening moves for all possible rolls.

Checkers solved

In case you have not heard it by now: Checkers is solved. A perfect play of both sides will always lead to a draw. Checkers is the most complex game at the moment that is solved. Have a look at Chinook for a detailed description of the project. It took them 24 years to calculate all 5 * 10^20 possibilities in a legal game.

So checkers solved, chess dominated by computers and backgammon as well. If you are looking for a game where computers do not stand a chance against a decent human you should head straight to Go. There are 4.7 * 10^170 positions possible in Go whereas chess "only" has 10^43. And because computers are still calculating each and every move - more or less - they got to much to do. Humans just have a better "feeling" for a situation - if trained well.

Well i guess in another 30 years or even less chess will be solved as well. And maybe someday Go might fall - but by this time we will all be living inside the matrix anyway.