About the Site

Motivations for this Site

The chief motivation for this site is to present interesting games that for the most part are not yet part of electronic databases. In addition, there is entertaining (semi-recent) history and the blog format is ideal so readers can chip in and flesh out the memories. The best thing about semi-recent history is that most of the characters are still alive!

The site is divided, generally speaking, into decades starting from the 1970s and going into the 2000s. To kick it off, I simply started annotating “undiscovered” games in June 2007 along with whatever memories I could muster. The mention on the Susan Polgar blog site gave it a big push in July 2007.

Brief Background on IM Mark Ginsburg

Dr. Mark Ginsburg received his International Master title in 1982 from FIDE, the World Chess Organization headed at that time by GM Fridrik Olafsson. He has been battling in the International arena for over 30 years. He won the Manhattan Chess Club Championship twice, in 1988 and 1990, before that venerable Carnegie Hall institution sadly went the way of the dodo. His peak rating was 2578 in 1992, putting him 28th in the USA. His specialty is opening innovation.

Mark’s undergraduate degree was from Princeton (Biology) and did graduate work at NYU, culminating in a Ph.D. in Information Systems. He is the author or co-author of two programming textbooks and numerous peer-reviewed articles on groupware, digital libraries, and e-business strategy. As for chess, his writings have appeared in Chess Life and he was the technical editor for GM Joel Benjamin’s magazine Chess Chow in the early 1990s. His publications are here and you might find particularly interesting an article on ICC and Volunteerism.

His most famous games are on the Chessgames.Com site. They include interesting wins over GMs Dzindzihashvili, Shamkovich, Benjamin, Wilder, Biyiasis, Balinas, Rohde, Armas, D. Gurevich, Dlugy, Fishbein, Henley, S. B. Hansen, and Wolff and other oddities such as a 4 queen position (QRR vs QQQR) in a game with NM Alan Williams. In addition, we have put up the 1970s and 1980s game collections in replayable format for your convenience.

You can find Mark on ICC as ‘aries2’.

May 2011 News:  “Chess U” on iTunes!

A recent project is Chess U on iTunes.  It’s a free platform to go through guided instructional quizzes.  The free course is Attack 101.  Modestly priced in-app purchase options (only $0.99)  include Rook Endgames 101 and Anand 101.  More coming.

Go get it by clicking on the banner ad!

Quick Photo Links

1980s photos

1990s photos

2000s photos

Photo Sampler

Here he is in Switzerland (Biel) about to lose to GM Robert Huebner in a torturous ending, Summer 2000. Photo Credit: Dr. Petra Schubert, Uni. Koblenz.

And let’s go on a time warp. Here he is at the Marshall Chess Club, 1981 (photo credit: Eric Schiller). Note the pink glasses which are a key fashion accessory when studying opening theory.

The Marshall CC was the site of many key triumphs and disasters; he made an IM norm there along with Tisdall and (later) Schroer. Fedorowicz also scored a key GM norm in a 1981 event.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Sara Walsh for Editorial and Press Assistance, to ChessUp.Net for Diagram Creation, MyChess for the replayable game Java applet, and Chess Base and Fritz for chess storage a nd engine assistance. Also thanks to interested parties from days gone by, such as Frank Teuton and others, for chipping in with key memories.  MG Addendum 7/15/08:  I should also mention Alexander Maryanovsky’s fancy new Web chess diagram creation resource (he used ImageMagick, a term familiar to Unix people).  His site allows the user a great detail of control over the set, the colors, enables circles and arrows to be drawn, and so on.  The user can then link back to his server to reference the chess diagram or opt to download the PGN graphic locally.

Curiosities that Open in a New Window

This link should show blogs that link to me!

This link should show all meta-information (external) information about my Chess History pages!

Get me out of this page!

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Licensing Terms

This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.