| Online Resources for Chess Player Biographies | ||||||||||
| The ideal approach would be a page per player with links to external resources. | ||||||||||
(January 2005)
Continuing our series of top-level reviews of Chess Categories (see Articles & Resources to the left) we looked at our Players and Other Personalities category.
This is where we link to Web resources specializing in biographical sketches of chess players and of other chess personalities.
By other chess personalities we mean writers, organizers, problemists, and gadflies who made their mark on the chess world in ways other than outstanding chess play.
There is far less material on these luminaries than on the players themselves.
For some reason, we had player links scattered across several of our own pages.
After consolidating them into the 'Players and Personalities' page, we decided to distinguish between sites that cover many players and sites that are dedicated to a single player, which are mostly fan sites.
We realized that there are many sites that specialize in sketches of all the World Champions, so we created a new category called World Champions (see the link box in the upper right corner of this article).
We think we have good coverage of the general sites, but have only scratched the surface on the dedicated sites.
Our ideal approach would be a page per player (matching our list of 'Famous Chess Players') with links to appropriate external resources.
Then we could point to our own pages whenever we mention a player, whether living or historical.
That page could be maintained independently and would lead to whatever is available.
This would allow us to treat historical players one way and active players another way, maintaining up-to-date career overviews for active players.
As it is now, with the exception of a few stars, our coverage of active players is far from satisfactory.
To improve this, we listed all players who have been world top-10 at some time during the years 2002, 2003, and 2004 (see the link box for 2004; each year links to the previous year).
This gave us 15 players who have been in the top-10 over the last three years.
We set out to find good sites for these players.
After coming up almost empty-handed for the first few names we looked at, we decided to address the problem differently : which sites offer the best material on active players?
We identified four sites which looked like promising sources for basic data (see the link box again).
The first name on our list is Michael Adams, so we set off to look at what each site had to say about the popular English player.
It includes a mention of his runnerup finish in the June/July 2004 FIDE Knockout Championship in Libya.
'In the 2004 FIDE Championship, he again found his way through to the final, winning matches against Hussien Asabri, Karen Asrian, Hichem Hamdouchi, Hikaru Nakamura, Vladimir Akopian and Teimour Radjabov, before losing to Rustam Kasimdzhanov in the final (3.5-4.5 after rapidplay tie-breaks, the match having been tied 3-3 after the six standard games).'
Wikipedia had articles on 12 of our 15 top players.
Missing were Bareev, Gelfand, and Grischuk.
The games are further categorized by 'Most Played Openings' with the White pieces [Sicilian (371)...] and with the Black pieces [Ruy Lopez (142)...]; and 'Notable Games' ('calculated by finding the games which most frequently appear in our users' game collections'); plus links to each game in chronological order loaded into an online game viewer ('page 1 of 69; games 1-25 of 1,719').
There's more! The Adams page also has a photo and a three paragraph bio that starts, 'Michael 'Mickey' Adams was born November 17, 1971. He currently has an Elo Rating of 2741, making him the number seven world player overall and Britain's highest rated player. He won the British Championship once in 1989 at the age of 17 and again in 1997.'
Finally, there is a feature called 'Kibitzer's Corner', which is a discussion group.
English GM Ray Keene participates in the discussions and wrote of Adams, '[He] is primarily a great practical player. He has never shown any great interest in writing about chess, contributing to magazines, or writing chess columns.'.
Whether you're looking for a career overview, games, photos, or gossip, you'll find what you need on one of these four sources.
Our next article on external links will take a closer look at resources covering chess blogs, chess magazines, and chess columns. See you then! [All articles in this series can be found under Resource Reviews (link box again).] |
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