The use of .ctg books in any interface with the standalone Aquarium adapter

Many computer chess amateurs like to tune and use opening books in the chessbase .ctg format.
Unfortunately this format is a close proprietary one the specifications of which are not public.
So until recently it was impossible to use .ctg books with anything else than chessbase commercial GUIs.
But now thanks to the ChessOK company -the makers of Aquarium DBMS and rybka-oriented GUI - who made it available for free, there is an utility that makes it possible to use any ctg book within any UCI-compliant GUI (the same is true for Aquarium-made books in their own .hsh format).
For this you need the standalone version of their adaptor (available here http://chessok.com/download/Aquarium/BookAdapterAquarium.zip) and either the full Aquarium program or the free demo available here (http://chessok.com/demo/Aquarium/AquariumDemoSetup.exe).
You will use Aquarium to build a configuration file for your ctg book.
Then the adaptor has its own GUI for adjusting various parameters regarding actual book use and selected engine. Finally you install the adaptor itself as a pseudo-engine in the GUI of your choice.
For a more detailed explanation you should have a look here (Charles Brown's excellent How-To in the Winboard forum - http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=50318) and there (Aquarium Book Adapter page by Felix Kling on Rybka's site - http://rybkachess.com/index.php?auswahl=Book+Adapter).

OpenWar broadcasted chess tournaments

One of the nicest places for following live tournament computer games is Olivier Deville's Openwar tournaments. You may see the actual running game using Tim McBurney's TLCV free software, while chatting with a nice group of computer afficionados. In the evening (european hours) there are most often a dozen of people chatting there, and sometimes a couple dozen ones, with always some of the most famous people in the computer chess scene discussing a variety of topics in a light friendly atmosphere.
Explanations and links are available here : http://www.open-aurec.com/chesswar/broadcast.html.
The OpenWar series of tournaments is a most interesting one, with all best free engines playing together with some of the best commercial ones and quite a few private or experimental engines. In the present 6th edition, after 39 of 91 rounds Naum 4 leads (38/39) ahead of Fruit 2.3.5m (37.5), Rybka 3 (36) and Bright 0.5a (35). Present edition is a 92 players single round robin played at 15' + 5'' Fisher-type time control. Up-to-date standings are here .

new Polyglot 1.4w24 at Fonzy's site

Fonzy Bluemers and friends continue to develop and bugfix my favorite UCI-to-WB adaptor.
Thanks to them.

Computer Chess Club archives

A searchable archive of all Computer Chess Club posts before its migration to a phpBB forum in march 2006.
http://www.stmintz.com/ccc/index.php

Real-time viewing of chess engine's "thinking"

http://turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/chess.html

The underlying engine does not seem to play strong chess but real-time animated plotting of its thinking is quite fascinating to watch.

ChessPub Openings forum

http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl
One of the best ressources on the web with discussions on current chess opening theory trends.
Several grandmasters are regular contributors with original analyses.

Chess openings theory at Kenilworth Chess Club

Michael Goeller maintains a most interesting page of hundreds (!) of categorised links to chess opening theory sites here : http://www.kenilworthchessclub.org/links/openings.html .
Quite a few interesting opening theory articles are hosted at his club's site :
http://www.kenilworthchessclub.org/articles/index.html
Michael himself contributed quite a few of the best among these ones.
He also regularly updates a blog with many interesting analyses :
http://www.kenilworthchessclub.org/kenilworthian/

ChessX 0.6 PGN database has just been released ...

... two years after last version.
Still not really a full-fledged chess database, but yet an interesting multi-platform PGN viewer and editor.

First post

Hi all.

A little blogging with reports of my chess travels on the web.

Marc