Arno Nickel
Arno Nickel (born February 15, 1952) is a German correspondence chess Grandmaster.
Arno Nickel currently (2006) lives in Berlin and writes and publishes chess books through his well-known Edition Marco. Since 1983 he has been editing the German "Schach-Kalender", a pocket-calendar with about 500 biographical player entries each year and a lot of information, stories, anecdotes, statistics, pictures and other things each year. From 1991 until 1994 he edited the "Schach-Journal" together with Alexander Koblencs, former trainer of Mikhail Tal. In 1996 he published Robert Hübner's famous book "Twenty-five Annotated Games". Nickel has also advanced his correspondence and freestyle chess knowledge.
In a correspondence match lasting many months, he won two games and drew a third against Hydra, the most powerful chess supercomputer in the world at that time (2005). Nickel, who achieved his grandmaster title in the era before GM-level chess computers, was allowed to use weaker personal computer chess engines to help him decide on his moves in this match. Hydra also received limited assistance from human chess experts and programmers, especially in choosing its opening book moves. T
Since 2005 Nickel has been promoting Freestyle Chess, a new kind of online chess competition with computer-assisted play, where anything is allowed, also help from other players. He is a co-organizer of the series of PAL/CSS Freestyle Tournaments in 2006, where teams of classic chess masters and grandmasters compete against correspondence chess and computer chess specialists as well as amateurs armed with computer chess engines. An unassisted human or unassisted computer playing alone has never won one of these events; the top prizes have always gone to human/computer teams (often with multiple humans and multiple computers on each team).
In March 2007 Arno Nickel beat ICCF World Champion Joop van Oosterom in their correspondence game from 21st WC Final. Nevertheless van Oosterom won the Final and became World Correspondence Champion for a second time. Nickel finished fifth out of 15 finalists.
On August 28, 2006 Nickel began to play an online correspondence chess game against the world, i.e. the combined efforts of the users of ChessGames.com. Nickel resigned this game on January 11, 2007 after White's 41st move. A rematch started on August 25, 2008, which ended in a draw on February 25, 2009. About 1500 users participated in each of these exhibition matches. [1].
On February 16, 2009 Arno Nickel won the Simon Webb Memorial, a category 15 correspondence chess event with 13 grandmasters. In the ICCF Champions League top group A, season 2007-2009, he achieved the best result on board 1. With an Elo of 2640 his ranking in the ICCF rating list 4/2011 is No. 19 of the World.
See also
External links
- Arno Nickel rating card at FIDE
- Arno Nickel comments and analyses two games played against Hydra
- Hydra vs Arno Nickel
- USCF Senior Master Stephen Ham vs. two chess programs
- Chess games of Arno Nickel including his games with Hydra
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