Chess and Rainbows in Bournemouth

I got back on Monday afternoon from a weekend away playing chess in Bournemouth, as I did last year. I managed to score 2.5/5 consisting of one loss, one win and three draws, which is about the best I've achieved. This photo of a rainbow was taken from the pier on the Friday before the first game. The rainbow was a complete semicircle but too large to capture in a single image. The sun was low in the sky, setting in the West, and the rain clouds were heading East. There are some photos of the Chess Congress here. A reasonable one including me is number 2754.

Grasshopper Chess

Thought it was about time I updated this diary. I seem to have been too busy with a variety of things to get round to writing about them.

I've spent a lot of time recently in putting the collection of Grasshopper Chess problems, that I made a good many years ago, onto my website. I've just completed all the problems with six or fewer pieces (unless some more turn up in other boxes). Also a group of helpstalemate problems, which tend to have more pieces. Several of these lacked solutions and I found I enjoyed solving them. Several of them, by C. M. Fox and P. C. Taylor in particular, were published in the Problemist Fairy Chess Supplement back in the thirties and show considerable ingenuity. Finding some of the unexpected solutions made me smile or even laugh.

There are still four folders and three boxes of problems to be processed, but if I will ever get round to doing them I don't know. I hoped they would inspire me to do some composing. I did add a line to one composition, and composed a variant of another. Perhaps that's a start.

Here's a link to the collection so far: http://www.mayhematics.com/q/g.htm
If anyone spots mistakes please let me know (george . jelliss @ virgin . net).