Random Round-Up

Hola darlings!

I'm tired tonight. It's been a long hard week. This will be short and sweet (I hope). I'm borrowing a phrase that dondelion thought up when we introduced our new feature at Goddesschess - called (have you guessed???) Random Round-up!

Susan Polgar will be presenting two commencement speeches tomorrow at Texas Tech U (morning and afternoon) for the Undergraduate ceremonies. At her website on Thursday May 10, 2007 GM Polgar posted that a big announcement would be made at the commencement ceremonies:

"All I can tell you right now is this has never been done anywhere in the world. This will be an incredible event for chess and it will make a big impact for the entire chess community. More news to come on Saturday!"

What will happen tomorrow - well, what hasn't been done under the sun before? My guess - and it's only that - is that GM Polgar will announce a new partnership between her Foundation and Texas Tech to fund sustained scholarship prizes or perhaps an endowment for scholarships for girls who participate in Polgar Foundation national tournaments and finish in the top spots. That would be great.

I don't have cable t.v. so I can't watch the speech and afterwards-promised press conference on CSPAN. What, exactly, is CSPAN, anyway? I'm sure the news will be presented in due course.

M-tel is going on right now but, frankly, since no chess femmes are partipating in that event, I'm not paying much attention, although I am rooting for GM Nisipeanu, for sentimental reasons. He was sooooo cute in Las Vegas in 1999. I'll see if I can dig up some picture of him from back then. The picture published at the beginning of this article is from his FIDE file, and he looks much better in it than he does today, but not as hot as he was in 1999. There's no year associated with that picture, so I don't know when it was taken, but at least he still had short hair!

I don't think he's so cute today, what the heck happened to the guy? He's 30 this year - he should be a GOD among chessplayers, in his prime and making women melt from longitude to latitude - and yet he looks like he's 60 years old with a beer-belly paunch. And that hippy-style pony-tail - what the heck is that all about? Yech! Oh, Kid (that was my nick-name for him back in 1999), what happened to you? You've even got adult-onset acne. You were once the stuff of women's dreams. Darling, you've to go on a serious diet, get a good haircut, and start using Pro-activ for that acne.

If you want to read about my experiences in Las Vegas during the 1999 FIDE World Chess Championships, check them out here. The posts cover a longer period surrounding the 1999 FIDE Knock-Out Championship, but you can scroll down to the dates you want. I arrived in Las Vegas on Friday the 13th (I'm not kidding), 1999, in time to watch GM Alexander Khalifman offer GM Judit Polgar a draw in the quarter-finals, which knocked her out of the event. I was there long enough to see The Kid (Nisipeanu) go down in defeat after a hard fought match with Khalifman. The equally cute Mickey Adams went down to defeat against Vladimir Akopian. Akopian was a super hunk back then - I bumped into him one day when he was exiting a taxi outside Caesar's Palace, I'm sure he doesn't remember. I wasn't arrested by hotel security, probably because they figured a woman of my age posed no serious security threat :)

I sat in the small audience that attended the 1999 Championships for six hours every single day during my stay there, getting a flat butt (ouch), just loving all that eye candy and trying to follow the moves they were making on the chessboards projected on overhead screens (a hopeless task for me). I enjoyed listening to the analysis provided by GMs on the headphones, they almost made things understandable to someone who aspires to patzer level.

Khalifman went on to play against GM Vladimir Akopian (he's let himself really go, it's too bad) and, as we know, Khalifman won the FIDE Knock-Out Championship. He's let himself go too; he looks like he's forgotten what a razor is and is in need of a good barber!

I'm geared toward the upcoming Candidates' Matches when GM Judit Polgar will be battling for a spot in the World Chess Championship Tournament. That's silly, really - I mean, once the candidates do the matches, why do they then have to do another set of matches later in the year in Mexico, where the current World Champion Kramnik will be playing and yet it doesn't mean a thing to him, since he'll still get to play the eventual winner anyway? Like - duh! Is Homer Simpson running FIDE?