Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Palmerston North NZCF Active Rating List

The red column is the National rank, blue column is Standard rating followed by date of last active period and green is Rapid rating followed by date.










i - inactive


* - Provisional


j - Junior


s - Senior


unr - unrated

Thursday, July 14, 2011

The Royal Game

But is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science, a technique, an art, that sways among these categories as Mohomet's coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval yet ever new; mechanical in operation yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space though boundless in its combinations... as proved by evidence, [chess is] more lasting in its being and presence than all books and achievements; the only game that belongs to all people and all ages; of which none knows the divinity that bestowed it on the world, to slay boredom, to sharpen the senses, to exhilirate the spirit . . .
Children can learn its simple rules, duffers succumb to its temptation, yet within this immutable tight square it creates a particular species of master not to be compared with any other - persons destined for chess alone, specific geniuses in whom vision, patience and technique are operative through a distribution no less precisely ordained than in mathematicians, poets, composers, but merely united on a different level.

Stefan Zweig