I was playing chess with my son over the weekend when I realized he was ready to learn some of the strategies in Chess. I always had a feeling that chess is one game which relates to real life situations and playing chess regularly helps us plan better in life. Not sure if that is anywhere close to reality, but that is what I feel about chess.

In any case, I was teaching him the most popular ‘Checkmate in four moves’ and the analysis of each move. While I was doing it, I wanted to write about it here and ended up searching for ways to represent the moves easily on the blog.

I came across some interesting DHTML scripts and also found a wordpress plugin.

The DHTML scripts were mostly from DHTML Goodies website and the plugin was found on Chess By Blog website . My requirement is not only to show it on the blog, but also to have the flexibility to add a single file with the moves and have the updates shown using embed code on the blog or any other website (just like how You Tube and Music Plugin allow you to show the videos and songs). Since the wordpress plugin is tightly integrated with WordPress, this will be of higher priority than the other DHTML based scripts, but I do not want to jump to conclusions. Will provide an update here on the

During this research, I also found about a few interesting topics about Chess, which I had not paid attention to, before this weekend.

The most popular notation used to represent the chess moves is called Portable Game Notation (PGN). This is the most commonly used set of steps to represent the moves in Chess. I have studied this notation in the past but only this weekend realized that this is called PGN. An example of the PGN is:
[Event “World Championship 31th”]
[Site “Moscow RUS”]
[Date “1984.09.24”]
[Round “5”]
[White “Karpov, Anatoly”]
[Black “Kasparov, Gary”]
[Result “1/2-1/2”]
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Be2 e6 7.O-O Be7 8.f4 O-O 9.Kh1 Qc7
10.Bf3 Nc6 11.a4 Re8 12.Be3 Rb8 13.Re1 Bd7 14.Qd3 Nxd4 15.Bxd4 e5 16.Ba7 Rbc8 17.Be3
Qc4 18.a5 h6 19.h3 Bf8 20.Bd2 Qd4 21.Be3 Qb4 1/2-1/2

There is another notation called Forsythe-Edwards Notation (FEN) which I am not quite familiar with, but I get to know that most of the DHTML codes and the plugins support both the PGN as well as the FEN notations.

While I was going through this, I came across a game between Anderssen and Kizeritzky (not sure when it was played). This is the best game I have ever followed in my life where white goes through a series of brilliant sacrifices, but provides the checkmate at the end that is the trademark of a brilliant strategist.

The PGN notation of this game is pasted below, but I will provide a visual representation of the board as soon as a good plugin is identified and finalized for this.

1.e4 e5
2.f4 exf4
3.Bc4 Qh4+
4.Kf1 b5
5.Bxb5 Nf6
6.Nf3 Qh6
7.d3 Nh5
8.Nh4 Qg5
9.Nf5 c6
10.Rg1 cxb5
11.g4 Nf6
12.h4 Qg6
13.h5 Qg5
14.Qf3 Ng8
15.Bxf4 Qf6
16.Nc3 Bc5
17.Nd5 Qxb2
18.Bd6 Bxg1
19.e5 Qxa1+
20.Ke2 Na6
21.Nxg7+ Kd8
22.Qf6+ Nxf6
23.Be7++

You can expect more of this in the near future. If you are a chess lover and are familiar with similar move situations, please do provide it here.

Here is a sample of how the board looks in this blog