It's here it's finally here!

http://www.chessinthelibrary.com/

It was a dark and stormy night when Yuanling and I have decided to make a website.

To be honest there was a lot of hard times making the website. From editing the content, to flash, to photoshop, and to confusing html, yet we did it. At times we thought that we could never do this or is on the verge of giving up. But after 1 and half month of hardwork it has finally arrived.

Everything you see is designed by me your humble webmaster. The only thing that isn't "homemade" is the feedreader(it was way beyond my level).

Thanks to Yuanling for this great opportunity to show off my web skills and thank TechForceOnCall for donating the webhosting server. Thanks to Macromedia flash for its wonderful functions and thanks to Macromedia dreamweaver for it's ease of control. Also thanks to Adobe photoshop.

Also thanks to inventor of the computer and internet and HTML for making this all possible.

PleasantView Branch week 4

This week, all our "regulars" have returned, sustained from last week is the number of people, as this week "16" people came again. As four weeks have passed, between the members and the organizers grew a great harmony. This week Aaron, Hazel and me were helping out, Sam couldn't make it because he was sick.

Business as usual, we played casual chess and with the great puzzles activity players were kept busy. The puzzle activity again proved its popularity as our players displayed strong interests.

After the rounds Aaron and I with 2 players played double chess together. It was a lot of fun. Other kids who also enjoyed this variation of chess played it as well. Maybe next time we will host a double chess tournament.

Another great idea came up by Hazel is to teach the players to write their moves down. This way we could put their games online, or even analyze it with them. Having the players writing the moves down could bring us a lot of benefits.

The website(made by me(not showing off or anything)) is upon completion. Hopefully you guys could see it by this very AFTERNOON!

www.chessinthelibrary.com ! it should work once Yuanling upload it.

Pleasant View Branch week 3

Our third meeting was held last Saturday at ten again. This time due to other appointments of Hazel's students, 16 people showed up. Which is still an optimistic number. Each week we have a steady "supply" of new members joining our program. And this time we had improvements to the program as well.

This week we set up another activity for the kids and that is puzzles. We had three boards(including a big instruction board that Hazel brought) and set up chess puzzles for the kids. One is for beginner, one is for intermediate, and the really cool instruction board was for advanced. Hazel also brought some candies and we used them as prizes for solving the puzzle. If one person solved it then we set up another puzzle. Hazel brought(yes she brought LOTS of stuff) other interesting puzzles, as well as scrap paper and scrap pens.

This time things went smoothly. The kids who are finished their games are invited to solve the puzzles. Ironically, advanced and intermediate was easily solved whereas the beginner puzzle stayed unsolved until i showed them the answer.

The puzzles activity is a big success as suprisingly people stayed longer and some of them still didn't leave even until almost 30 minutes after 12.

I thank Hazel for all her wonderful contributions.

And it was a great turn out for the program.

That's all for this week, see you next!

Pleasant View Branch week 2

Today we had our second meeting of the Chess in the Library program. It was great. There were almost 20 people here this time. We had a lot of fun. Because of a printer difficulty we had, we decided to hand the certificates from last week next week. I think the winners didn't mind at all.

Overall it was great, we've came across some very interesting games. But because the more players we had and Aaron's absence, we didn't have time to record interesting positions.

As Hazel mention in her blog, we are planning for some more activities, as some players in our Branch has finished 3 rounds in only 30 minutes while other players take 1 hour to complete a game. There is a strong demand of something else for them to do. In the brookbanks library we put chess books for the players to read, I have talked to the Librarian about it. We've decided that we should also put interesting puzzles or even use the television we have in that room for some chess movies.

The puzzle activity will be hosted by a organizer(me), with candy bars rewarded. I'll put up easy 2 move tactics and whoever solves it first gets a candy bar.

That's it for this week, see you next week!

My games

After showing off for Yuanling and Michael, i decided that i deserve some glory too(and to test multiply chess views' load time for the website). So here is a very "instructive" game played by me and this other guy on Chess.com. It is instructive because the epic use of pin, by me.

I am playing white, we played the C70: Ruy Lopez: Morphy Defense, Caro Variation.

Although having the same material on the board, the computer analysis shows that i was actually up by 3 point! How did i gain such an enormous advantage? Let's see the game.

Play online chess

So there you go, that was a good game played by me. I got the analysis from chess.com, unlike my friend Fritz 6, it thinks a bit different.

Surprise

To award our dedicated audience who has been so supporting, I now present to you a little "gift".

Now after knowing us, and our program, you must have wondered: "How good in chess are the organizers?". Well I will tell you now.

First of all I suck so we'll skip me.

Yuanling Yuan and Michael Kleinman are good, REALLY good. And here is a interesting game played between the 2 in 2008. Michael Kleinman played white while Yuanling Yuan played Black. The end result was that Michael got checkmated by Yuanling, sadly the scoresheet didn't have the record of the glorious checkmate.How did i get the scoresheet? I don't know either, but here is the game between the two. Commented by me and my smart friend, Fritz 6.

Play chess online

Pleasant View branch first meeting!

The first meeting of the Pleasant View branch took place August 1st, 2009. The festival and the long weekend has taken it's toll on the program as only 11 out of the 27 people who signed up showed up.

Dispite the lack of number of people, the fun and the quality of the games wasn't affected at all. The people who came had a great time; the whole room was so filled with laughter and the joy of victory, that we had to constantly remind people to be quiet.

Lots of people were helping out: Aaron, Hazel, and Sam. They did a great job at keeping the people quiet and engaged, espeically Hazel for her helpful instructions given to the more amateur players.

We came across a very interesting checkmate position where pins are involved, there was a lot of neat things about this checkmate.

CHECKMATE

Watch now nicely the knight takes away c2 square from the king. Qf2 pins the e pawn so the checkmate cannot be blocked.

That's all for this week, see you next week people.