Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chess

WikiProject Chess Shortcut: WP:CHESS
Navigation Menu
Project Page	talk
Assessment	talk
Assessment statistics	talk
Review	talk
Chess Portal	talk

Skip to: the bottom of page to add a new topic or see most recent new topics

Good article reassessment for Alexander Alekhine

Alexander Alekhine has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 02:46, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess/Reviewed articles

I would like to update this, by adding a featured list, removing two former good articles that have been delisted, and adding four good articles. I anticipate that this will be an editor's nightmare. Would anyone object if I first separated the list of FAs from the list of GAs, and then made the list of GAs easier to edit, by either changing it to one-column format, or taking it out of table format altogether? Bruce leverett (talk) 01:06, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

I see that the present format was adopted 'way back in 2009, by some editors who are not heavily active in chess-related article any more. I will carry out my proposed change, but document it in the talk page of that article, rather than here.

Also, after reviewing the instructions for creating Wikipedia tables, I have figured out how to distribute the Good Articles into two columns, without having to redistribute them by hand every time one adds or removes an entry from the table. So I will do that, rather than changing into one-column format or taking it out of table format altogether. Bruce leverett (talk) 21:03, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

It has been pointed out to me that Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess/Reviewed articles is an obsolete early version of Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess/Recognized content, and that WP:Chess transcludes both of them. The right thing for me to do, therefore, is just delete the former version and remove the transclusion of it. Sorry for any confusion I may have caused by the above paragraphs. Bruce leverett (talk) 14:40, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Magnus Carlsen

Magnus Carlsen has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 17:13, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Classical chess

Until now, this page redirected to just chess. But in common chess parlance, the term "classical chess" usually refers to long time controls, the opposite of fast chess, which has a dedicated article. After some deliberation, I've retargeted it to glossary of chess § classical, which is a bit more appropriate, but should this be its own article? The history of classical chess is currently not adequately covered anywhere on Wikipedia. 9ninety (talk) 07:50, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

To me "classical chess" is just "chess". MaxBrowne2 (talk) 11:46, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

Classical chess specifically refers to slow or "standard" chess, as opposed to rapid or blitz. And it's becoming an increasingly relevant term nowadays as we frequently hear top players saying they're not motivated to play classical and that rapid or freestyle is the future.

Wiktionary defines classical chess as "Chess played at a slow time control, with games taking up to several hours". Chess.com also gives a similar definition. 9ninety (talk) 08:19, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Max knows all that, but possibly has the same puzzlement about your claim that I have. You say, "The history of classical chess is currently not adequately covered anywhere on Wikipedia." Say what?? Every wikipedia page about chess history is a page about the history of classical chess. And my library has a few books about chess history but no books about "the history of classical chess", so you are talking about a research topic that doesn't exist. In chess scholarship, "classical" is more likely attached to a style, era, or school, in contrast to Romantic and Hypermodern (School of chess#Classical school). All that said, anyone is free to change the classical chess redirect into an article. I'm not opposed to that, I would just suggest that such an article should not duplicate too much currently at chess and warn that anyone trying to remove material currently at "chess" to spin it out to "classical chess" will meet strong opposition from me. Quale (talk) 16:17, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Draft:World Student Team Chess Championship

Hi, this looks like a worthy article, but we need to get some sources together to demonstrate notability. Certainly many world class GMs participated in the event between 1954 and 1977. Kazic's "International Championship Chess" (1972) is a solid source but dated (it only covers events up to 1972), while Olimpbase faces the self-published objection, though we have found it to be reliable and useful over the years. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 05:04, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

It seems most of those events had a tournament book of some sort, usually written by Jaroslav Sajtar. [1] They were organized by the International Union of Students, independently at first and then in conjunction with FIDE. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 23:40, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

Another possible source is Kenneth Harkness's Official Chess Handbook (1967), which covers the events from 1954 to 1966. Any other source suggestions are welcome. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 00:11, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Here is a link to an article about the 1960 World Student Team, from Chess Life. I will post more about it in the talk page of the draft article. Bruce leverett (talk) 14:39, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

Can list of chess openings be redeemed?

List of chess openings has always been bad, but can it be redeemed? I would have nominated the list for deletion years ago if I thought there was any realistic chance it could be deep sixed to put it and us out of misery. I think Max has expressed concerns about this page as well. Quale (talk) 18:48, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Looking at both the edit history and the talk page, I guess it has gone through several stages. The present stage looks too unwieldy, not to mention unsourced. But was there an earlier stage when it was more plausible than it is now?

I might also ask: since Wikipedia has its own ideas of what a "List" article should look like, is it possible to fit the chess openings into that model? Bruce leverett (talk) 19:24, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

The question of what the list should be is interesting. My personal inclination would be to have a much leaner list, something along the lines of https://www.365chess.com/eco.php, but this might be pointlessly redundant to Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings. I can also understand why some people would prefer a more comprehensive list, even including the goofy stuff. The list lichess uses is as far as I as am willing to go: https://github.com/lichess-org/chess-openings. I have qualms about creating such a list based on a single source, but since lichess is kind enough to make their data available in machine-readable formats, it would only require a few tens of lines of Python to spit out H:WIKITEXT that we could paste directly into the article. Quale (talk) 00:01, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

Another possible format would be this, with one line per ECO code. This article used to have a format like that (for example this version which is from 2006), but editors weren't content with it. Since this is Wikipedia, editor want to link from this article to our own articles about openings; but this often leads to two or more links from one ECO code. On the other hand some ECO codes don't have any links; these include some very popular variations, such as "symmetrical English". So the ECO codes aren't perfect as a framework for creating a Wikipedia list of openings, but they are quite a lot better than nothing; I have often consulted the chessgames.com list to look things up.

The present version of the article bears a superficial resemblance to the Index of Named Openings and Variations in the back pages of The Oxford Companion to Chess. But for every entry in that list, there is an article in the book, however short, that refers to it. At least I think there is, based on my sampling of the list; there aren't "links" (page numbers) back to the articles, but it's easy to find them, since it's all in alphabetical order. I think that for the present format to be encyclopedic, we could not give a name for any variation or any opening unless we mentioned that variation or opening by name in some openings article. Moreover, all those mentions should have anchors, so that we could link back to them from this article. Bruce leverett (talk) 18:18, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

This version is better than what we have now. We could use something like that and retitle it to something like "list of chess openings by ECO code". We could still mention the more important sublines within ECO codes, but we need to lose all those stupid meme opening names. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 23:18, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

My attention was drawn to the article again recently by the number and scale of the changes being made to the article by an anon editor. My initial impulse was to revert, but at least the anon editor is trying to improve the list which is more than I have ever done for it. The current form of the changes isn't going to fly because the extensive use of preformatted sections is a no-no. It could be reformatted to meet expected enwiki standards, but I think the big motivation for the anon editor is to format it just so, despite the fact that that formatting won't stand here. Quale (talk) 03:26, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

I would be happy to start an argument with the anon editor on the talk page. I would raise two issues:

• unsourced opening names, esp. "meme openings";
• extensive use of preformatted sections. What is "chapter and verse" for this (save me the trouble of looking for it).

I appreciate that the anon editor cares about this article, so I don't plan to get deeply involved, but offering some advice on the talk page is a normal Wikipedia reaction. Bruce leverett (talk) 04:39, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, those are good instincts. Of course the ultimate reference on style and formatting is WP:MOS, but abandon all hope if you expect to absorb it in toto. The Manual of Style is a vast labyrinth of pages and I find it impossible to do more than pick up some basics and then possibly try to look up specific points when needed. I don't know that MOS specifically addresses use of HTML <pre> tags although there is a prescription to use wiki markup instead of HTML. MOS:LIST is the specific style guideline on lists. Quale (talk) 05:52, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

Comment

The Erik Kislik article that got PRODed has more merit than the William Graif one which recently got accepted, after being rejected 2 years ago. MaxBrowne2 (talk) MaxBrowne2 (talk) 09:13, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

I think that the references are a load of fluff. The uschess.org reference is a blurb advertising a podcast. The mention by Bryan Smith in chess dot com is just a passing reference. I googled his book, and found some blogs where somebody liked it, but no serious reviews. I would still say this is uncontroversial. Bruce leverett (talk) 14:42, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

That one is at least debatable, as opposed to the connect 4 master. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 15:01, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

Chess World Cup 1982

The articles to create section on WP:CHESS says "We need to cover Chess World Cup 1982, held in Hamburg and televised". I looked for some sources and was able to find some YouTube videos of the event, but can't find much info. Does anyone know any good sources detailing this event? 9ninety (talk) 08:42, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Presumably British Chess Magazine would have had some coverage. Chess Life archives are a possible source, https://new.uschess.org/chess-life-digital-archives. Unfortunately 1982 predates start of The Week in Chess.

I didn't find anything definitive. Google's search AI says that the 1982 World Cup was actually the three Interzonals in 1982 (Las Palmas, Moscow, and Tulaca), but I don't know if that's correct. We have crosstables in World Chess Championship 1984–1985. Mark Weeks has useful resources on the world championships, but I didn't find anything on https://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/wcc-indx.htm to confirm or refute the idea that the Interzonals were a World Cup.

Maybe the Hamburg TV event(s) were called the World Cup. On these crosstables at 365chess.com the events are called Hamburg TV-A and Hamburg TV-B. Quale (talk) 06:30, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

The Interzonals were not the World Cup. In this video of a TV broadcast of the event, the presenter/commentator announces it as the Chess World Cup and indeed mentions two groups A and B, which aligns with 365chess. At 1:45 in the video, you can see the playing hall and it says "TV World Cup Chess 1982" on the wall in English, and the FIDE logo is visible. It seems that the group winners Karpov and Spassky played a final which went to a playoff; here's a broadcast of the same. It seems the event was played in September 1982, but I can't find more precise dates. The games are available on chessgames (e.g. [2][3]) but with no tournament overview.

Do we have sufficient information and sources to create an article? 9ninety (talk) 08:54, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

I don't know. The participants make the event notable, so as you point out, sources are the only question. German newspaper archives would probably be helpful and I'm sure there's someone around who can read German. I had hoped there might be an article at de.wikipedia.org, but if there is I couldn't find it. Someone who knows German might have more success with the German wikipedia as well. We could look in the articles of the participants. I see a one-line mention in Boris Spassky#Later tournament career (after 1976) which cites a book by Karpov. That suggests something else, we could examine biographies of the participants. I know John Nunn has written about his career. Quale (talk) 21:53, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

Here you go! Cobblet (talk) 02:42, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Cobblet has the best answer.

Nunn seems to be a dead end as he doesn't mention Hamburg in Grandmaster Chess, the book in which describes his chess career from 1975 to 1984. He is a fun writer though, and although my fellow chess editors will (quite correctly) disagree, I want to find a way to get his description of the 1983 European Team Championship into wikipedia. On page 279, Nunn writes: "The Final of the European Team Championship took place in Plovdiv, Bulgaria during June. The hotel and playing conditions were very good, but the food was not. To me it seemed to consist entirely of cucumbers; meals would start with cucumber soup, continue with some kind of cucumber and end with cucumber soufflé (OK, the last is an exaggeration). I haven't been able to eat a cucumber since. After a week of this Jonathan Mestel declared that he would accept a one in a million chance of instant death in return for an avocado." Quale (talk) 05:09, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Mechanical maintenance of the public watchlist

Over the years I've tried to help keep WP:WikiProject Chess/Index of chess articles up to date by adding newly created articles from time to time. I had made a few small additions and corrections in 2024 and 2025, but I hadn't done a comprehensive search for missing article links since 2023. In April, when I tried to get the index caught up I found that it was quite a lot of work and I didn't enjoy it. I use this Help:Public watchlist all the time so I want to keep it up to date, but I also want to expend a lot less toil maintaining it. I got completely burned out making around 500 additions, renames, and sorting corrections to the chess articles index over 2 weeks in April and May and I think I'm done trying to maintain that index by hand.

The problem of finding new chess articles that are not on the watch list is mechanizable without too much effort, but the drudgery is in integrating the new articles into Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess/Index of chess articles. The page is divided into many sections, so adding links to new articles requires finding the correct section and carefully inserting the links in the correct alphabetical spot. This is just a lot of mostly pointless work. Finding the section is harder than it should be because Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess/Index of chess_articles#Tournaments & competitions articles is partitioned into a ridiculous number of overlapping subsections. There is no difficulty finding the appropriate section for chess biographies, but sorting names can be difficult, especially when you must account for Eastern name order and long Spanish names. There are also several reasonable sorting systems for names and it isn't clear which one this page should use. (To be fair, it probably doesn't make much difference.) Even sorting regular article titles is a bit of a bother, as sometimes we have ignored small common leading words such as "A" and "The" and other times we haven't.

The easy way to maintain the list is to generate it whole by mechanical means and replace the entire page each time. This could be done by a true bot, but currently I simply use the pywikibot library to recursively scan Category:chess and its subcategories to find all chess articles, generate the watchlist wikitext by linking all chess articles but omitting redirects, and then copy and paste the text into the watchlist page by hand. It takes a a short Python script little less than 3 minutes to scan 1062 chess categories to find 7628 pages. About 50 of those pages are redirects and are omitted from the watchlist. If the watchlist is generated mechanically and is not intended to be edited by hand then the section structure and order of the links is unimportant. A simple thing that is also easily comprehensible by humans is to sort the article titles as strings. That's what Arvindn did in 20024 when he created the original chess articles list page.

You can see what this might look like at User:Quale/publicwatchlist. I will probably maintain this or a similar watchlist for my own use, but it could also replace or sit alongside the current Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess/Index of chess_articles. Would chess editors like this public watchlist (or something similar) at Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess/publicwatchlist? (That's the name that {{public watchlist}} uses by default.) My intent is to update the watchlist by scanning the chess categories once or twice a week.

There are currently 91 articles linked from my public watchlist that are not on the WP:CHESS Index. To be fair, there's a good chance that we might not really want to watch some pages that find their way into chess categories such as LXXXVIII (album), but there are others that definitely belong including Belgrade International Women's Grandmaster Chess Tournament. Some are renamed pages like Women's World Chess Championship 1937 match where the Index is currently watching the redirect at the page's old name. (I'm happy to provide a list of the 91 articles if someone is interesting in adding some or all of them to the Index.) Quale (talk) 04:07, 17 June 2025 (UTC)