From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com Date: 00/11/01, 08:39 Re: Chess History on the Web (2000 no.21) Site review - UPITT (II) It should be no surprise that I've been closely following the Kasparov - Kramnik match and have been updating my World Championship site after each game. When Kramnik won game 10, it started to look like he had an excellent chance to win the match. At the moment I write this, he leads +2-0=12 with two games to play. If he draws either of those games, he wins the match. What title will he hold and will he be numbered as the 14th world champion? These issues will be largely decided by the court of public opinion. Yes, your opinion counts. When Kasparov played White in game 13 on Sunday, he allowed a draw after 14 moves. This indicated that he had almost given up hope of pulling even and had perhaps resigned the match psychologically. When we remember that Kasparov considers 13 to be his lucky number, the drawn game seems even more significant. Perhaps it was a silent protest against the match conditions. The games of the match are being played on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. The two games played during the weekend mean that the player with White on Sunday has a definite disadvantage, a flaw which was certainly considered by both players when they agreed to the match conditions. While considering all of this, it occurred to me that I know very little about this new champion named Vladimir Kramnik. I remember when Karpov, Kasparov, and Khalifman each popped into my field of awareness, but it seemed as though Kramnik has always been there. This, of course, is nonsense since he's younger than the three other champions that I just listed. I decided to do some research into his career. Yahoo doesn't list a single page referencing Kramnik in its directory of 1.000.000 pages. Its search engine, which recently switched from Inktomi to Google, returns 'about 5030' web page matches. A direct search on Google for 'kramnik chess' yielded 'about 8150' pages. For some reason, a couple of my own pages showed up in 4th position on this search. A few years ago I gave up all hope of ever understanding how the search engines rank pages. This will always be one of the Web's mysteries for me. I was unable to find anything approaching an extensive biography for Kramnik. KasparovChess at www.kasparovchess.com says... 'Vladimir Kramnik - The Challenger - Professional Rating: 2751 (#2) - Nationality: Russian - Birth date: June 25, 1975 - Career even score against Kasparov - Style: Positional, python-like - Strengths: Youth, great nerves, defensive skills, has worked with Kasparov and knows him well - Nicknames: Volodya, Vlady, Vlad the Impaler, Ovik' ...Who first applied the description 'Vlad the Impaler' to Kramnik?! The London Chess Center is the official site for the match and says more about Kramnik's career at... http://www.chesscenter.com/wcc2000/kramnik.html ...but is still very brief. I found two other biographical pages at... Vladimir Kramnik http://chess.lostcity.nl/chessclassic/kramnik.html Vladimir Kramnik - Unofficial Biography http://freespace.virgin.net/kenny.m/Reports/Kramnik%20biobraphy.htm ...but these are both out of date and not completely satisfactory. How about Kramnik's games? I downloaded the Kramnik file (KRAMN-PG.ZIP) from the University of Pittsburgh (UPITT) archive at http://www.pitt.edu/~schach/. The DIZ file informs us that KRAMN-PG covers 'Vladimir Kramnik, 1988-1996: 616 Games'. I found only two games from 1996, which meant that Kramnik's career from 1996 through 2000 is missing completely. I decided to build a compilation of his games. I followed the procedure that I described in 'Chess History on the Web (2000 no.20)' when I compiled a collection of Kasparov's known games. After preparing the UPITT file and eliminating duplicate game scores, I searched my archive of 'The Week in Chess' (TWIC) files and extracted Kramnik's games from TWIC 96 (1996-08-19) through TWIC 311 (2000-10-23). This procedure yielded another 427 games. The first was from a tournament in Vienna (1996.08.12 Rd.4), while the last was from London (2000.10.22 Rd.9), the title match with Kasparov. A few years ago I stupidly deleted TWIC 1 (1994-09-17) through 95 (1996-08-12) when I needed space on my hard disk. At the time I thought that I would always be able to access those files on the TWIC or UPITT sites, but I was unable to find them while researching this article. I suppose that the files were deleted to promote sales of the TWIC CD. I can't disagree with that! Because of this glitch I was missing many of Kramnik's games played in 1996. Fortunately, I kept a list of the games which had been distributed in the missing TWIC files, so I was able to determine which events had been included on the missing files. I went back to UPITT to find and download those events. That's why I'm calling this site review 'UPITT (II)' -- it's a small test to see how well the UPITT event files cover the gaps in the player files. UPITT yielded 88 games from 8 tournaments. The only event I couldn't find was a 1996 rapid tournament played in Frankfurt. I also visited my local chess store and bought a copy of 'Kramnik - My life and games' by Kramnik & Iakov Damsky. You can find the book on Amazon.com at... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1857442709/worldchesscham.7 ...along with a few reviews. The Chess Cafe at www.chesscafe.com has a more extensive book review as well as a recent bulletin board thread (#248) discussing the book. In addition to some biographical material, the book contains 178 games -- that's actually 179, because number 97 is used twice. I checked that the games in the book were also in my collection. I found that 17 games were missing -- thirteen early games from the period 1984-1991, three games from Dortmund 1997, and the game Gelfand - Kramnik, European Club Cup, Berlin 1996. Checking further, I found that the entire Dortmund tournament was missing from my file. After keying in the 13 early games, I returned to UPITT and found neither the Dortmund tournament nor the Berlin game. I also checked Chesslab at www.chesslab.com, where I found only three games from the Dortmund tournament & also failed to find the Berlin game. There was clearly something wrong here. After a brief investigation, I discovered that my ZIP copy of TWIC 140 (1997-07-14) had been corrupted. Where could I find the games from the tournament? I accessed Lars Balzer list of sites with downloadable game files at... http://www.rhrk.uni-kl.de/%7ebalzer/index.html ...and located 'German Base' at... http://home.t-online.de/home/detta64/ ...where the 1997DORT.ZIP file had the complete tournament in ChessBase format. I returned to UPITT, downloaded the CB2PGN.ZIP converter program, converted the Dortmund file from ChessBase to PGN, extracted the Kramnik games, and added them to my collection. I also keyed in the missing Berlin game. Satisfied that my Kramnik collection was reasonably complete, I created an index page and uploaded the material to... http://members.tripod.com/~Mark_Weeks/chw00k01/kramnik.htm ...from which the PGN collection of 1130 games can be downloaded. I'll continue to improve both the index and the game collection in the days ahead. While I was working on the Kramnik file, I suddenly remembered when I became aware of Kramnik as an extremely gifted player. Here's some background. Kramnik's name first appeared on the FIDE rating list in July 1989 with an ELO of 2490. He had just turned 14 years old. Two years later he was still listed with the same rating. On the January 1992 list, his rating suddenly jumped 100 points to 2590, when he was ranked 46th-51st in the world. His rating steadily improved over the next three lists to 2625 (20-27th), 2685 (6th), and 2710, when he was ranked 3rd. He should have been ranked 4th, but this was the July 1993 list where Kasparov and Short had been dropped from the rating list by FIDE President Campomanes. Since that time, Kramnik has been ranked in the top five on every FIDE rating list. On the January 1996 list, he tied for the 1st-2nd position with Kasparov, although his peak 2790 rating was achieved a year later. The sensational rise from 1991 to 1993 was confirmed by his qualification into both the FIDE and PCA candidate cycles in 1993. In July, he finished 2nd-9th (9th on tiebreak) at the FIDE Interzonal in Biel, Switzerland. In December, he finished 3rd-7th (4th on tiebreak) at the PCA Qualifier in Groningen, Netherlands. Only 18 years old at the time, it was clear that a major force had arrived on the chess scene. If Kramnik beats Kasparov, the chess world can certainly be proud of this modest new champion. Bye for now, Mark Weeks