New website after a week

My new website has now been live for just over a week and in that time I have been investigating its usage, both during that week and in the month before that. A couple of interesting facts have come to light.

During May, when the Joomla site was there, the administrator login page was accessed over 3000 times. All but a handful of those accesses were not by me as I was too busy developing the new site to regularly update the old one. As nothing was changed, I assume that all the login attempts not by me failed. This huge number of unfriendly accesses was not new, but was about average for any month. This was one of the reasons why I decided to abandon Joomla.

Now that the Joomla site is not there, the administrator login page is not there, but there have nonetheless been 48 attempts to access it in the last week. There also appear to have been 8 attempts to access a non-existent WordPress login page. I have never used WordPress on this site.

Putting the new site live has caught the search-engine crawlers on the hop. At least three of them have all week been attempting to access pages that are no longer there. These attempts make up the vast majority of the traffic. I suppose that this is to be expected given the large amount of data in the Meson Chess Problem Database. I haven't made any checks, but I would imagine finding the new site via a search engine is not yet possible.

Before the change, Meson was the most popular part of the site, and still is. This week 743 chess problems have been retrieved and viewed, which is just about the same as when the old site was there. Hopefully Meson now looks better and is easier to use.

ECF Team Problem Sovling Championship for juniors

I duly finished preparing the material for the ECF Team Problem Solving Championship for juniors (at Imperial College, London) and sent it to the director of the event, Phillip Beckett. However, I didn't make it to the competition myself, having stupidly injured my arm some days previously. It would have been a very long day, with lots of travelling, and I just couldn't face it. I am glad to report that the event seems to have gone off OK and that my arm is on the mend. You can see a report of the event, written by Phillip Beckett, on the ECF website.

In other news, I have now transferred all the photographs from my old site to my new site.

From Nottingham to Imperial College

I completed the preparation work for the BCPS residential weekend at Nottingham and duly attended the meeting.

The solving tourney comprised 11 chess problems and one endgame study. I knew that at least one former World Chess Solving Champion (Michel Caillaud of France) would be taking part, so I had to make it tough. Nobody solved the endgame study (a nice original by Steffen Slumstrup Neilsen of Norway) and Michel also failed on the more-mover, so perhaps the whole tourney was too tough? In the event it was Michael McDowell who came first, with 51 points out of 60 and Michel came second on 46.5. As Michael was the top-placed British solver, he also won the Ron Brain Cup for yet another year.

The first six problems were all two-movers - directmates, selfmates and helpmates - and formed a tourney within a tourney for those who just wanted to solve shorter problems. Of the three solvers who elected to take part in this minor competition, Barry Barnes and David Shire both handed in their solutions within the first hour, Barry being faster. Neither of them scored full marks, both dropping points on one of the selfmates, but, as Barry was less careless than David, he took the first prize.

I proposed the theme for the Fairy composing tourney, the challenge being to compose problems using the Checkless Chess fairy condition, with or without fairy pieces but with no additional fairy conditions being added. As I decided many years ago not to judge composing tourneys we managed to persuade Stephen Emmerson to do the honours. Stephen wasn't actually at the meeting, but the entries (10 of them) were transmitted to him by email early on Sunday night. His award arrived sometime late on Sunday night while I was in the bar chin-wagging with Neal Turner. The top-placed problems were by Michel Caillaud, Michel Caillaud, Christopher Jones and Michael McDowell.

The solving tourney wasn't the only thing that was difficult. Steve Giddins concocted a trivia quiz around the Inspector Morse TV stories and John Rice presented a chess-themed crossword.

Of course, the meeting was about far more than competitions. We had several lectures. John Rice gave a talk about the late Jeremy Morse. Steve Giddins also talked about Jeremy, showing two of his endgame studies together with two studies by the late Adam Sobey. Neal Turner talked about his mind-bending speciality of SAT and grasshopper kings. Barry Barnes talked about another recently-deceased composer - the great Valentin Rudenko of Ukraine. We even had the unexpected pleasure of a brief visit from John Ling, who gave a very short presentation of one of his favourite problems by Comins Mansfield.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable weekend, despite some difficulties encountered in the hotel.

I am now in the middle of preparing a solving tourney for an ECF Junior event taking place at Imperial College in London on Wednesday next week. The juniors will have mates in one, mates in two, selfmates in two and helpmates in two to challenge them. Just two rounds of that to do now.

This afternoon I have done more work on my new website. I have now included all the endgame study material from the existing site and also added four further columns from my series in Chess, taking that collection up to the end of 2011. When time permits I shall start moving the chess problem material to the new site.

Olympic Composing Tourney

Later this year the Chess Olympiad will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan. As part of the celebrations a chess composing tourney was organised. The provisional award of the section for mates in three has just been published. This evening I have been looking at it and I would like to share one of the problems with you.

Grigory Atayants

1st HM., Olympic Ty., 2016

Mate in 3

Solution:

1.Qg2!       (2.Qxc6+ dxc6 3.Bxc6#)

1...Sxg2     2.Sa8    &    3.Sc7#
1...Bxg2     2.Sc4    &    3.Ra5#
1...Rxg2     2.Bxd7   &    3.Bxc6#
1...Qxg2     2.Sc8    &    3.Sa7#
1...Sd5      2.Bxd7   &    3.Bxc6#
1...Rd5,Rxd6 2.Qxa2   &    3.Ra5#
1...Qh1      2.Sc8    &    3.Sa7#

In making the key, White moves his queen en prise to three more black pieces and threatens to sacrifice it on c6. In answer, Black four times captures the queen, but each time he deprives himself of a useful defence and White can take advantage of the fact. For instance, after 1...Sxg2, White threatens 3.Sc7 and Black can no longer play 2...Sd5 or 2...Se6 to defend against it. In addition the white queen shows she is not just bait when the black rook defends on d5 or d6. 1...Sd5, by blocking the line from g2 to c6 has the same effect as 1...Rxg2 and so leads to the same thing. Lastly, 1...Qh1 makes the same error as 1...Qxg2. Apart from the threat, there is quiet play throughout, which I always value. Nice to see such an old-fashioned problem getting such a high place in a modern award.