General Information
The Match
The Chess Events Maastricht Foundation is proud to announce a Complete Chess match between the Dutch Grandmasters Loek Van Wely (32, ELO 2687) and Daniel Stellwagen (18, ELO 2532). They will play four games in Maastricht, The Netherlands from 10 - 13 May 2005. Both players may use a computer with ChessBase software during the encounters.
Complete Chess
The match will start with two games of Complete Classic Chess. The two Dutch grandmasters will continue with Complete Random Chess in the other two games, which means that the initial positions of the pieces will be decided by chance. Random Chess is nothing new these days, but never before the rules developed by Count Van Zuylen van Nijevelt and Baron Van der Hoeven have been applied in a match between top players. The players use computers like in Advanced Chess and the time limits from Classic Chess will be used in all games (40 moves in two hours, followed by 20 in one and finally 15 minutes plus 30 seconds per move).
Confrontation of generations
The match will be a confrontation between two generations. The 32-year old Van Wely has won the last five championships of the Netherlands. Stellwagen (18) is the youngest Grandmaster in The Netherlands and showed his abilities in various tournaments. Both players have played matches in Maastricht before. In 2002 Loek van Wely played in a spectacular man-against-machine encounter against the Dutch program Rebel: the match ended 2-2. Last year, Daniel Stellwagen won the first Complete Chess Match against the German talent David Baramidze 2,5-1,5.
Additional information
When Van Wely and Stellwagen play in Maastricht, they follow in the footsteps of Maarten van ‘t Kruijs. He won Amsterdam 1851, the first Dutch chess tournament, and Amsterdam 1852, the first random chess event. Count van Zuylen van Nyevelt had suggested random chess in 1792. His nephew Baron van der Hoeven reworked the idea for Amsterdam 1852. The position of a white piece at the first rank was decided by chance, but the bishops had to occupy squares of a different colour. Thereafter the black pieces were placed on mirrored squares. We will draw for the colour and position in round one. The same position will be used in the second game. More information about Van ‘t Kruijs can be found on www.endgame.nl/Kruijs.htm.