ChessHive

Obviously, Topalov cannot hold on to the lead

Linares R9: Grischuk stops Topalov, joins him in lead

Alexander Grischuk won his second game in a row, the third in this tournament. He beat the leader Veselin Topalov, avenging a loss to him in the first half. Topalov and Grischuk go into the final round tied for first. Topalov has white against Gelfand, Grischuk black against Vallejo. It's going to be an exciting finish.

The Ideal Chess Club and Chess Tournament Manager

If I only have the programming skills, I would have invented the best, ideal chess club (or even chess tournament) manager based on PHP and MySQL. No, it's not a chess playing server. It would have the following functions/features:

1. Based on PHP and MySQL. So that means it basically is a web application accessible through a web browser;
2. Should include a players database, complete with initial (local) ELO ratings, photo, and history of games;
3. As an admin of the site, you can create a new tournament and picking the players from the database only;
4. Tournaments can be of any size (less than a hundred players is ideal) and any number of rounds. It can also be either swiss or round-robin;
5. Tie-break systems (Buchholz + Progressive for Swiss, and Berger for Round Robin) are supported;
6. Pairings are done by the system, based on accepted pairing system depending on whether it's a swiss or round-robin, and based also on the latest ELO (local) ratings;
7. Late-joining and quiting an ongoing tournament is fully supported;
8. Game results are posted manually, and there's an optional field to paste the game's PGN (portable game notation) for future reference. Pairings for the next round (for swiss system) are automatically (and correctly) generated after all the results are posted;
9. Tournament standings are viewable at any time during and after the tournament;
10. Change in Elo ratings are automatically computed after the game (based on the current ratings of both players and the number of games they both already have in the database), and the players database automatically updated;
11. Concurrent open tournaments are accepted -- with a detailed system on how to resolve rating changes based on which tourney finishes first;
12. Import/export of specific tournament details are supported, so tournaments can be exported to a local install, updates are made to the local install, and tournament results are posted back (imported) to the online install (ok, that system would be kind of hard to implement, but not impossible);
13. It is open source (GPL);

That would have been a great system if only one exists. If I were only a programmer, I know this system is not hard to code and implement. Those are only "IF's".

Any legitimate programmer up for the challenge?

What of the Aquarium Chess Software that I Really Hate?

The software is very much unstable. It's very buggy. I'm already running the latest version, 3.2.1, on a Windows Vista machine. Maybe the "free" Arena could even be more stable that it.

I recently hosted an all-engine tournament using Aquarium. It was a 10-engine (so no bye) 5-round Swiss format tournament. When the tournament was finished, I just couldn't understand the results using the Aquarium interface. There is no crosstable view to offer.

So what I did was export the games to pgn and imported them back inside ChessBase's Fritz12 (ChessProgram12). Then this is how it turned out in Fritz:

See that? Some engines finished with only 4 games, some 6, some 7. I mean, what the f*#k is going on in here?