Musings from Dresden Part 1
Submitted by
Zug on Sat, 11/22/2008 at 3:32pm.
I'm here at the World Chess Olympics in Dresden, Germany, and I'll be reporting on various behind-the-scenes topics and human interest stories. Here is Part 1.
If You’ve never been to a large chess tournament, don’t feel too badly. You see, I have, and compared to the World Chess Olympics, even the World Open in Philadelphia is a small weekend Swiss.
The venue in Dresden, Germany is, well, huge. Take a look at the picture below:
This is the main playing hall. I took this photograph from right behind board one, so you’re seeing exactly what, say, Gata Kamsky would see when he gazes out over the crowd. Note that you can’t see to the end. That’s because there are 468 boards set up in this one single room. I know, ‘cause I walked around and counted ‘em. There is a veritable sea of chess.
Each board is configured with nice wooden pieces and a digital clock. The top 200 boards or so are also wirelessly connected to a master computer for the transmission of both the moves and time for rendering on electronic demo boards that are set up literally everywhere. You can’t go more than 20 feet without seeing one of these monitors.
In addition, the monitors rotate among all the games, so you can follow all the games without having to go from monitor to monitor.
Below are some more photos of the playing hall from different perspectives.
This photo is from near the back of the playing hall:
And here is one directly from the back of the hall:
And now one from where only the press can go. Sometimes you do need "those stinking badges" as they said in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:
Okay, that's it for now. Look for Part 2 soon!
- Mike Petersen
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