The Indian Defense

"My own view is that the sport belongs to everybody who plays it, but the question of its origins is easy enough to answer: chess comes from India", says VISWANATHAN ANAND.

Gates Logout from Microsoft

Tech Icon Goes From Software to Charity. The 52-year-old has promised to donate the money to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the charitable fund he set up with his wife to finance health and education programs around the world. ‘We want to give it back to society in the way that it will have the most positive impact,” he said. “I want to make a positive contribution to the world.” Read all in ABCNews.

New York Roof Gardens

Some of the nice roof gardens we can see from the top of Empire State Building. (Photos taken in May 2004)

Street Chess

ART GALLERY - Marcel Duchamp

Portrait of Chess Players. A playful man, Duchamp prodded thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much with words, but with actions such as dubbing a urinal art and naming it Fountain, and by "giving up" art to play chess. When he moved to Paris in 1923 he was no longer a practicing artist. Instead he played and studied chess, which he played for the rest of his life to the near exclusion of all other activity. Duchamp's obsessive fascination with chess can be traced back much earlier to the themes of his major art pieces. Read more here.

Chess Quotes

Life's too short for chess. - Henry J. Byron

Chess is ruthless: you've got to be prepared to kill people. - Nigel Short

The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists. - Marcel Duchamp

Shot Chess