Keiki O Pele (Children of Pele) Chess Club
The alternative chess club which is open to all ICC & FICS members who declare that Pele is the true Goddess of chess.

I.C.C.

The Internet Chess Club

F.I.C.S.

The Free Internet Chess Server

PAUSE or PLAY MUSIC
T39 theme music : Closing
by Philip Glass
There are currently 3 Keiki O chess teams in the Team 45- 45 League

Team Keiki O Pele
Team Keiki O Kilauea
Team Keiki O Mano

Home of Pelechess

Table of Contents

Team Keiki O Pele
Goddess Pele and the fake Cassia
Despair's video Bar
The First Move
Possibilities
The Five Schools of Chess
Some Philosophical Quotations on Chess
Coming soon:
Useful Chessite Links
Chess and Music

Team Keiki O Pele is:

• Despair Captain
  Despair's bio: Dom from Sydney, I am a high school student. I learnt to play chess from my father at the age of eight. I hate racism, conservative thinking and global warming skeptics, while I love music, chess, philosophy and math. Team motto for T39: "Per angusta in augusta - Through difficulties to great things." See you at Sydney's coolest chess club: the Newtown Chess Club
• czek
  Bio. coming soon!
• BigH
  
  
  Name : Henri Torkkola

  Age : 15

  Home : Tampere, Finland

• Pelayo Assistant Captain
  Pelayo's bio: I am a physician and faculty at Stanford University School of Medicine where I practice sleep medicine. If I had not learned to play chess as a child I doubt I would have survived medical school. After several decades away from the game I have taken up chess in the ICC. Prior to joining the ICC, my chess highlight was playing against Karpov in a simultaneous exhibition when he visited Puerto Rico. I learned of the ICC from being a regular listener to the Howard Stern Show. (F Jackie).
• Quotha
  Quotha's bio: Quotha - English gentleman, 30, planetary scientist, lawyer, poet, writer, tinnitus sufferer, who plays chess to while away the hours and flatter myself that I have talents that others do not possess. My ICC handle comes from a seminal 12" vinyl record by Aphex Twin, slightly adapted.

   

• Pele (pronounced peh-leh, not pay-lay)

  Pele's appearance signals a need for awakening, even chess awakening. Have you been sitting still for too long?

  Have you been lulled into sleep by the evenness in your life?

  Has reality been too difficult to grasp?

  Get ready to awaken your awareness and come into full consciousness by facing Keiki O Pele. Now is the time to see things as they really are, to initiate change so things can be as you want them to be. Now is the time to wake up to your potential and power, and move the chess pieces. Pay attention to all that life is telling you. The Goddess says that when you nurture awakening, your life becomes creative rather than reactive, an infinitely more powerful place to be!

  Pele guides her devotees to greater chess wisdom.

  We are inspired by the ancient Goddess.

  Kilauea is considered to be the present home of Pele, is the volcano goddess of ancient Hawaiian legend. Several special lava formations are named after her, including Pele's Tears (small droplets of lava that cool in the air and retain their teardrop shapes) and Pele's Hair (thin, brittle strands of volcanic glass that often form during the explosions that accompany a lava flow as it enters the ocean).A volcanic mountain can be a beautiful breath-taking scene, or it can be a horror when it erupts and strands of Pele's hair flow down from it, destroying everything in their path. The Goddress Pele is on Keiki O Pele side, so remember it is not only our team you are taking on.

  

  Goddess Pele is like a normal human when it comes to feelings, but she is more of a Goddess when it comes to rage and anger. Even if she is the slightest bit annoyed, then she will start a volcanic eruption of some sort or a lava flow. This is the metaphor for our chess. Let the lava flow.

  THE MYTH OF Caïssa

  Cassia, (pronounced kah-EE-suh) did not exist in antiquity, she is a fake goddess that was invent by the then17 year old poet, (later Sir) William Jones in 1763, when he worte this acceptionally bad and boring poem which he called Caissa . This appaulling and pretentious poem was written in Latin hexameters, in which he created a myth about the origin of chess that has become well known in chess world. We call on all chess players to assert the ancient Goddess Pele as the ture "Goddess of Chess" over this fake 18th century invention of William Jones.

  

• Despair's Video BarPlease PAUSE MUSIC first
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The Oxford Companion to Chess lists 1327 named openings and variants. However, White's Opening move is called the following:
  e4 is King's pawn opening; d4 is Queen's pawn; c4 is English opening; Nf3 is Reti opening; f4 is Bird's opening; b4 is the Polish opening; Nc3 is the Dunst opening; b3 is the Nimzovich-Larsen attack; g3 is Benko's opening; g4 is Grob's attack; e3 is the Van't Kruijs opening; a3 is Anderssen's opening; d3 is the Mieses opening; Na3 is Durkin's attack; c3 is the Saragossa opening; a4 is the Ware opening; f3 is Gedult's opening; h3 is the Basman-Clemenz opening; Nh3 is the Amar opening; and h4 is the Anti-Borg opening.
• Black's Opening move to e4 (usually a defense) is called:
  c5 is the Sicillian defense; e6 is the French defense; c6 is the Caro-Kann defense; d5 is Scandinavian; d6 is Pirc; Nf6 is Alekhine; g6 is Robatsch; Nc6 is Nimzovich; b6 is Owen; a6 is St. George; g5 is Reversed Grob; Nh6 is Hippopotamus; f5 is Fred Defence- not the Dutch (d4, f5); a5 is Corn Stalk, f6 is Barnes; Na6 is Lemming; and h6 is Carr's. e5, b5, and h5 are all part of the King's Pawn opening.
• POSSIBILITIES:
  If a new version were set up every miunte it would take 400,000 years, day and night, to set the 208,089,907,200 ways of placing a standard set on a standard board before play begains! After just 3 moves each more then 9,000,000 positions are possible! The number of different games of 40 moves has been estimated at 25x10 to the power of 113, which is much greater then the number of electrons in the universe (est. at just 10 to the power of 79). Source "Guinness Chess: The Records" by Ken Whyld.
• 
• 
  
  On the origins of chess
  
  

  From its invention somewhere in India around 500 A.D., to its enthusiastic adoption by the Persians and its spread by Islamic warriors, to its remarkable use as a moral guide in the Middle Ages and its political utility in the Enlightenment, to its crucial importance in the birth of cognitive science and its key role in the aesthetic of modernism in twentieth-century art, to its twenty-first-century importance in the development of artificial intelligence, chess has been a remarkably omnipresent factor in the development of civilization. Indeed, some neuroscientists believe that playing chess may actually alter the structure of the brain, that it may be for individuals what it has been for civilization: a virus that makes us smarter.
  See David Shenk: The Immortal Game: A History of Chess.

  On the origins of chess see Viswanathan Anand's, The Indian Defense: Where he clearly states his opinion of where chess originated. "I've heard the ownership of chess being claimed by Russians, Chinese, Ukrainians, Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Spaniards and Greeks. My own view is that the sport belongs to everybody who plays it, but the question of its origins is easy enough to answer: chess comes from India."

• The five schools of chess:
  ..... from the 1800's to the 21st century.

  
  
  
  The Romantic School.
  See left for a typical King's Gambit of the 19th Century.
  Let's start out with a little chess history. Romantic chess was the style of chess prevalent in the 19th century. Starting in the 1800's, a school of thought called Romanticism began to take hold in the chess world. It was characterized by brash sacrifices and open, tactical games. Winning was secondary to winning with style, so much, in fact, that it was considered unsportsmanly to decline a gambit (the sacrifice of a pawn or piece to obtain an attack). It is no coincidence that the most popular opening played by the Romantics was the King's Gambit accepted. Some of the major players of the Romantic era were Adolf Anderssen, Paul Morphy and Henry Blackburne. The Romantic style was effectively ended on the highest level by Wilhelm Steinitz, who, with his more positional approach, crushed all of his contemporaries and ushered in the modern age of chess.
  
  During this period Romanticism was the philosophy of many players, that the king's flank is the most important. Romantic players often played for tactics alone, ignoring the center. In fact, winning came second to winning with style.The Romantic Movement (dating from roughly 1800 – 1850) was marked by an emphasis on emotion (as opposed to reason) and originality (as opposed to conformity). Beginning as a limited artistic reaction of French and German writers against the rational, mechanizing influences of the Enlightenment, Romanticism would rapidly spread to all parts of Western culture.

  Nineteenth century chess, also partook of the Romanticist sentiment. Positionally, the games were open, with gambits at the start, and speculative, sacrificial attacks making up the middle-game (with endgames seldom reached!). The great master of this period was Paul Morphy (1837- 1884), whose games are still studied for their combinative brilliance.

• 
  The Classical School.
  Then came the first World Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, who crushed his opponents with his deep positional understanding. He was the first modern master to impress upon his students the importance of the center. Steinitz was the first player who in his play demonstrated a mastery of positional chess ideas and the ideas he developed came to be known as the "Classical" or "Modern" school of thought. This school of thought emphasized the importance of "static" advantages such as: avoidance of pawn weaknesses, strong outposts for knights, and striving for "good" rather than "bad" bishops in locked pawn positions. This school of thought was in turn a reaction to the earlier swashbuckling style of Adolf Anderssen, Henry Blackburne and others who represented the Romantic school.Some of his later disciples, including Tarrasch, Lasker, and Capablanca, went on to spread his beliefs about the center. Tarrasch was the leader of this school of thought, and was called "the father of Classical dogma".
• 
  The Hypermodern School. A revolution in theory
  In the 1920s there was a revolutionary change in chess theory. Several Central European players like Richard Réti, Aron Nimzowitsch, Ernst Gruenfeld and others exploded onto the chess scene to dominate chess during the next few decades. Their ideas formed the basis for the Hypermodern school. The idea was that a large pawn center would eventually overextend itself and become a target. Nimzowitsch in particular believed in the importance of piece play against the center. His legacy, the Nimzo-Indian Defence (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4- ECO E40-59), is very popular today with the world's strongest grandmasters. It involves restraining the central pawns with pieces. Hypermodernism is a school of chess thought which advocates controlling the centre of the board with distant pieces rather than with pawns, thus inviting the opponent to occupy the centre with pawns which can then become objects of attack.
  Howard Staunton and other mid-19th century players of his era understood many of the ideas that we now consider as hypermodern (according to Korn & DeFirmian Modern Chess Openings 1990:625). The Hypermodern School of chess theory came to prominence in the 1920s, and as mentioned before, its leading members all came from central Europe (ie: Aron Nimzowitsch, Richard Réti, Ksawery Tartakower, and Gyula Breyer). They felt that chess was becoming boring, slow and unworthwhile. They also believed that chess could not be defined by a simple set of laws or principles, such as those laid out by the German Siegbert Tarrasch.
  Their ideas were thus a challenge to the existing orthodoxy popularised by Tarrasch in the 1890s. This orthodoxy was a rather dogmatic distillation of the ideas worked out by the great chess pioneer Wilhelm Steinitz. In 1922, Richard Réti published Die neuen Ideen im Schachspiel (the English translation, Modern Ideas in Chess, was published in 1923), an examination of the evolution of chess thinking from the time of Paul Morphy through the beginning of the hypermodern school. Tartakower's book Die hypermoderne Schachpartie (Hyper-modernist chess play) was published in 1924. Nimzowitsch's famous book Mein System (My System) was published in 1924 and included elements of Hypermodernism, but was largely a text on positional chess. Although none of the primary exponents of the Hypermodern School never achieved the title of World Chess Champion, they were among the world's strongest players.
  
  Hypermodern openings include the Réti Opening, Benko's Opening, King's Indian Defence, Queen's Indian Defence, Nimzo-Indian Defence, Grünfeld Defence, Bogo-Indian Defence, Old Indian Defence, Catalan Opening, King's Indian Attack, Alekhine's Defence, Modern Defence, Pirc Defence, Larsen's opening, and to a lesser hegemonydegree the English Opening. Openings such as 1.a3 do not constitute hypermodern openings since, although they delay the occupation of the centre with pawns, they also delay development which is not consistent with Hypermodernism.
• Russian Dynamism or Soviet hegemony:
  Alexander Alexhine, left.
  During the 1930s Hypermodernism and Classical dogma often clashed with each other. Classical dogma was more popular than Hypermodernism, and eventually two openings threatened to dominate international chess: the Queen's Gambit Declined and the Ruy Lopez, both sound classical openings. World Champion Alexander Alekhine (& inventor of Alekhine's Defence) was associated with hypermodernism though his style was more of a blend with the Classical School. In practice hypermodernism has not replaced the classical theory of Steinitz and Tarrasch. Instead, modern chess textbooks describe hypermodernism as an addition, or extension, to classical theory. In the end after Alekhine's death, a new generation of Soviet masters took hold, introducing a new philosophy regarding the center. Russian Dynamism, a blend of Hypermodernism, which stresses piece play, and Classicalism, which emphasized the pawn center, came with a welcome change to the Indian Defenses and the Sicilian Defense. Russian Dynamism said that it was okay to allow central pawn weaknesses for dynamic piece play. This brought with it a variety of new openings, such as the Boleslavsky Variation in the Sicilian Defense (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 e5), which allows a hole on d5 in return for active play against the e4-pawn.
  
  There has been controversy over the notion of a distinct Soviet or Russian school of chess. Modern chess historians Hooper and Whyld defined a school as 'players who share a common view regarding the strategy of the game'. They rejected the notion of a Soviet School and proposed Soviet hegemony. Despite the title of the classic book 'The Soviet School of Chess' by Kotov and Yudovich, and the use of the phrase 'Soviet School' in chess literature. For the chess historians Hooper and Whyld "there never was such a school." Despite the fact that the Soviet grip on the world chess title remained firm as a series of their grandmasters handed the title from one to another. The chairs for title matches were the exclusive domain of Soviet players -- Smyslov, David Bronstein, Mikhail Tal, Tigran Petrosian, and Boris Spassky -- until Robert Fischer (USA) blasted through to a title match against Spassky in 1972. Fischer won, but he immediately abandoned professional chess and the stage was set for the next generation of Soviet & Russian stars -- Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov -- continued by Vladimir Kramnik and Alexander Morozevich. The are currently seven Russian players that are rated over 2700 as of 2, July, 2008. The hegemony of Russian chess clearly continues around the world, especially, in the former ex-Soviet countries . One final note: Botvinnik believed in the existence of a 'Soviet School of Chess' and wrote, 'What are the inherent qualities of our native school; what differentiates it in principle from the foreign school? In my opinion, it is the social status of the game in our country : not just a pastime, not just a table game.' (from Botvinnik's '100 Selected Games')
• The (Post) Modern School:
  The Modern School: In the Digital Age
  Essentially, the Modern school was introduced by Bobby Fischer, but as early as the 1930's Richard Réti prophesied the evolution of the modern shool when he stated: "It is the aim of the modern school, not to treat every position according to one general law, but according to the principle inherent in the position". Indeed, Fischer believed that a dose of all three schools was the correct approach to chess, and had wonderful games using all ideas, including his many great victories with the Najdorf Sicilian. Later world champions like Karpov and Kasparov built up on his work, leading to the present-day school of thought that all previous ideas were correct in their own way. Magnus Carlsen is typical of this modern pragmatic school. The modern professional grandmaster has to adopts a more scientific approach to openings, backed by databases and computer analysis, to a level which their 19th century Romantic predecessors could never do. The digital age is here, as Nigel Short said in 2005: "Chess is the ultimate mind sport and the internet was made for chess."
  
  In his recent book (The Immortal Game: A History of Chess), David Shenk simplistically argues that there were only "four great eras" of chess : Romantic, Scientific, Hypermodern and what he calls New Dynamism. This totally ignores the contribution of and influnence that 20th century Soviet (or Russian Dynamism) has had upon the history and evolution of modern chess.

 

.........

• Some Philosophical Views on Chess
  
  
  Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make people happy. Siegbert Tarrasch
• Chess is in its essence a game, in its form an art, and in its execution a science. Baron Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa
• Chess is the game which reflects most honour on human wit. Voltaire
• Chess is eminently and emphatically the philosopher's game. Paul Morphy
• Chess is the touchstone of intellect. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe. Indian proverb
• Chess is a sport. A violent sport. This detracts from its most artistic connections. One intriguing aspect of the game that does not imply artistic connotations is the geometrical patterns and variations of the actual set-up of the pieces in the combinative, tactical, strategical and positional sense. It is a sad means of expression though - somewhat like religious art - it is not very gay. If it is anything, it is a struggle. Marcel Duchamp
  
• Chess is mental torture. Garry Kasparov
• Chess is so deep, I simply feel lost.  Vladimir Kramnik
• [Chess is] as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency. Raymond Chandler in The Long Goodbye
• Chess is a fathead and feudal game  Georges Perec
  (in his book promoting Go)
• Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders. Savielly Tartakower
• Chess is all about objectivity and so is life. Zong-Yuan Zhao
• Chess is a beautiful mistress to whom we keep coming back, no matter how many times she rejects us.Brent Larsen
• Chess is life  Bobby Fischer
• Chess is like life - Boris Spassky
• Chess is everything - art, science, and sport.Anatoly Karpov
• Chess is 99 percent tactics.  RichardTeichmann
• Chess is really 99 percent calculation  Andrew Soltis
• Chess is mental torture.  Garry Kasparov
• Chess is ruthless: you've got to be prepared to kill people.  Nigel Short
• Despise the enemy strategically, but take him seriously tactically. Chairman Mao
• Chess is an art appearing in the form of a game ..(it is) only a recreation and not an occupation. Vladimir Lenin
• Chess is despair. Norman Tweed Whitaker.
  When asked what happened to the money, Whitaker replied, "I do not know and I wish I did". See: "Shady Side: The Life and Crimes of Norman Tweed Whitaker: Chess Master", published by Cassia.
• Chess is as much a mystery as women  Cecil Purdy.
  Cecil John Sneddon (or C.J.S. 1906- 76) Purdy was quite an accomplished player in his day. An Australian, he was an International Master (a difficult title to achieve in the days before jet travel if you were from Down Under) as well as being the first World Correspondence Chess Champion.
  Bobby Fischer is said to have declared Purdy to be the finest chess teacher in the business, and many others have echoed this sentiment over the years. Purdy founded and edited the magazine Australasian Chess Review (1929-1944); this became Check (1944-45), and finally Chessworld (1946-1967). Some of his writings are still in print. He is somewhat famous for saying;"Pawn endings are to chess as putting is to golf." He died of an heart attack playing over the board. His last words were: "I have a win, it may take some time."
• When I play chess, I relax. I enjoy. Arianne Caoili

 

 

Pelechess currently has 67 (FICS, ICC and ChessWorld) members if you wish to declare Pele the true Goddess of chess, or wish to enquire about joining -or starting - a chess team simply message Despair on ICC or for correspondence chess go to Letsplaychess- Chessworld; or MaunaKeaMike on ICC; or Cinematic on FICS. email:dom@squaring.net