Pac-Man Chess Tetris

I was in a discussion about the Admiral Nakhimov chess set. The thread is gone, as the thread maker's account is closed for abuse, and so the discussion, too, was discontinued. Among other things, it had been a thread made by a customer to promote the great work available from the manufacturer ERWoodLeatherShop of Kharkiv, Ukraine, producing under conditions of the ongoing war. So, maybe I can bring just a little bit of that attention back.

The question I had discussed was, which of the pieces of admiral Nakhimov's chess set represented the king and which the queen? There are two photographs:

While the upper colour photo from the Moscow museum places the piece with the finial on the king's square, the older b/w presentation has the pieces without finial on the kings' squares.

The thread presented two sets from ERWoodLeatherShop. One was a reproduction of a 'Tal' set (and a very nice one). The other one was a reproduction of the 'Admiral Nakhimov'. In that set, we find a finial on the piece that was without finial in above pics, and the piece is the king in that reproduced set.

I had put in question this decision of the makers of the repro, for the following two reasons: 1) The well-known Poltava set is a set that has a king with a round finial and a 'bald' queen, and the same could go for the Nakhimov:

My partner in discussion claimed that the piece lacking a finial in the original Nakhimov, nevertheless, was a piece with masculine features, whereas the piece with the ball on top was one with feminine features- a typical way to distinguish king and queen. I responded that the Russian name for the queen traditionally was 'ferz', denominating a counsellor of the king and not a queen, and that, therefore, the king still might be the more slender and elegant piece with the finial.

I decided to simply ask Kate of ERWoodLeatherShop. I had a very friendly exchange of messages, her answers always being quick and refreshing.

-First of all, she sent me a photo from an original set from Poltava, Ukraine, with the good news that they were just working on a reproduction right now. How's that for timing?

King and queen:

Concerning the Nakhimov, she stated that they had had no photos of the original finial and authored it themselves! And they decided to put a finial on the piece that had none, because in the photo from the museum it looked more massive and taller, so that they took it for the king(- backing up the argument of my adversary, of course). As for the use of 'ferz' she said that, in her childhood, they only ever called the queen 'queen'!

A couple of days ago, finally, I got a message that ERWoodLeatherShop- Kate and her husband- finished their Poltava reproduction of the early original version they have!

As to the original poster of that thread, while I do not bear your behaviour (you certainly don't like mine) we were in a discussion and I would have liked to continue it. I hope you already got your Tal set by now, and that it is lovely.

A closed account is not a solution but a station on the journey, a new train will have another name, I guess

Yerevan, 1962- The photo from Tal-Krogius in the Soviet Championship that inspired the first recreation of a 'Tal' set by Chuck Grau and Noj.

Curacao, 1962, chess is friendship

Leipzig, 1960- 'Congratulations, Bill!'

Bled, 1959- probably round 13 of the candidates in Yugoslavia- Tal pausing his first move at a Caro-Kann just to play a Sicilian

A photo from the ERWoodLeatherShop

Thanks for reading

The first match USSR vs. the rest of the world took place from March 29th to April 4th 1970 in Belgrade.

Each team had nominated 10 players for the boards 1-10 and two reserve players who could be used on any board. 20 of the top 22 were playing, with all 24 nominees from the top 30. A chess fever in Belgrade. 63 journalists were reporting.

All positions in the photographs are taken from the encounters on day one.

Board one Boris Spassky-Bent Larsen and board two Bobby Fischer-Tigran Petrosian

Board three Viktor Korchnoi-Lajos Portisch and board four Vlastimil Hort-Lev Polugajevsky

Board five Efim Geller-Svetozar Gligoric and board six Samuel Reshevsky-Vassily Smyslov

Board eight Milan Matulovic-Michail Botvinnik and board seven Mark Taimanov-Wolfgang Uhlmann

Board nine Michail Tal-Miguel Najdorf and board ten Borislav Ivkov-Paul Keres

Gorgeous sets! Not just beautiful design and craftsmanship, but imbued with the intangible qualities of age, these sets are unsurpassed by any but a very few contemporary makers.

Posts like these are a reason I visit Chess.com

Life is a miracle.

Chess is a game of peace. It shares all power.

Everyone can unfold their ways to use it in a friendly fight!

Let us grow strong together

Two cases of 'open blindfold' : The smurf set as used in a long distance OTB game with Powderdigit, (who played his part with his Mexicans, then)

And now the 'Golden Brown'. A set possibly German, possibly 1920ies, indistinguishable sides except for the kings. One troupe rather golden, the other one rather brown, but wear and light have likened them. I set up a position from a nice daily I played in May with magictwanger

A handful of stills from the beautiful Dutch film 'Lang leve de Koningin' by Esme Lammers from 1995, about a girl who is talking to her chess pieces.

The last pic is showing the jubilation of the sides mating and mated, all together

A position from the game Caruana-Maghsoodloo, Tata Steel 2023, round 7, after 13. .. Bb4-d6.

This game was drawn after 106 moves and 7 hours, 15 minutes of play.

This is an onion top set, origin unknown, bought in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. I find this old board with the rounded corners to be in accord with the design of the pieces.

The position is from a recent daily with a friend, a king's gambit position from a series of plausible moves (xcept for the last one): 1.e4 e5 2.f4 ef 3.Nf3 d5 4.ed Nf6 5.Bc4 Nxd5 6.0-0 Bg4 7.Nc3 Nxc3 8.bc Bh5??

So this is a puzzle for you if you can see it well enough. {Right-click and open in new tab to access the full-sized image}. White to play and win.

The molehills look like debris and the sunlight looks like smoke from fires.

That is a really good-looking table @ungewichtet. Your sets get a lot of daylight... nice, and Spring is nearly here for us folks in the N. Hemisphere. Lastly, that mole community sure is thriving there; their industrious spirits must be nurtured by the rich, worm-filled soil. Interesting composition. TY

It really is a board, that was sitting on a stool today. On the flipside it has Nine Men's Morris.

Both the terms 'Morris' and 'mills' may be versions of the latin 'merellus' which is for token, game piece. The German name of the game where you take turns placing, then moving and ultimately 'flying' your nine stones onto 24 intersections to build lines of three is "Mühle", the Swiss "Nünistei", the former saying mill, the latter saying nine stones.

I got lucky and was sent very beautiful old pieces from (East) Berlin, the daughter remembered her father playing with them in the 1960ies, possibly they are from the 60ies or 50ies (there is blue flowers on the sunny pics, too):

Both kings' finials' crossbeams have been pretty razed. The kings are 82mm, the chessmen are unfelted and unweighted. They don't fall over easily, by design.

The former owner must have been quite a good player, because his daughter remembered her father once giving a simultaneous exhibition. In the Berlin club I used to know (of course, that may well be the custom in many other places) it is honour and duty of the club champion to play all club members who want to join a simul. Maybe it was that kind of occasion. She remembered him having several sets, but this was the one he used to use, and the one that stood out.

Even though I could not find his name in a search machine, I tried to set up a position in the local spirit. Accordingly, I chose a game from the 16th chess championship of the GDR, played in 1967, that is pairing two masters from Berlin. It is from the game Hermann Brameyer vs. Lothar Kollberg, https://www.365chess.com/game.php?gid=2605438 after white's 12th move, Bd3-b5.

We close with a close-up. For me, this is a new set, but maybe somebody has seen it before or even knows exactly where it was made. -Thank you for visiting Pac-man Chess Tetris!

Beutifull!!!