After having eaten plenty for Thanksgiving (and plenty of leftovers during the long weekend), it was easy to fall behind on what was happening in the chess world. Here are a few of the highlights from the last week:
Hikaru Nakamura followed up a solid performance at the World Blitz Championships by winning the BNBank Blitz tournament in Olso, Norway. Last year, Nakamura won this event over Magnus Carlsen; this year, the field wasn't nearly as strong, and Nakamura was a clear favorite. In fact, he was a perfect 13/13 before the final against Simen Agdestein, who stayed even with Nakamura until a final Armageddon game went in the American's favor. One really cool aspect to this tournament was that an amateur player was able to win his way into the tournament through an auction! Sure, the 1428-rated Joshua Schmidt paid about $360 to lose 10 games, but I'm sure he had a great time doing it!According to a report in the New York Times, an audit on the Turkish Chess Federation has found that the federation paid some delegates to vote for their bid to host the 2012 Chess Olympiad. The fallout -- if any -- from this won't be known for a while, but FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has said that Turkey will host the Olympiad as long as he's still in charge of FIDE.The 30th Open Dutch Computer Chess Championship was held this past week, with Rybka winning another title. Several of the other top programs were not in attendance, but there was a Jonny system running with 800(!) cores that seemed poised to make a challenge. Of course, with Rybka running on 260 cores itself, it seemed unlikely that the extra computing power would make up for the nearly 300-point rating difference between the two programs had on equal hardware. Ultimately, Rybka ended up scoring 8.5/9, dropping only a draw against Spark, one of three programs that shared second place with 6 points.
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