Today we're recognizing another major contributor to the work of The Checker Maven. Bob Murr, expert checkerist from Colorado Springs, has helped us in many ways on many occasions, with feedback, corrections, new material, and on-site reporting.

To accompany today's Checker Maven articles, Bob has provided us with PDN files for both Ryan's Tricks, Traps & Shots of the Checkerboard as well as Ginsberg's Principles of Strategy in the Game of Checkers. You can find these in the new PDN section of our Downloads category, as listed in the column to the right.

Our thanks to Mr. Murr for his continued support of The Checker Maven and the great game of checkers!

Have you ever visited Prague's historic Tyrs House, in the Czech Republic?

Most of us have not, and likely never will. But Yunior Lopez and John Post may get to do just that, if we are willing to help them out.

Tyrs House is the home of the Czech Sokol Organization, and is a famed sport and conference venue. Throughout its long history it has played a major role in the Czech athletics scene. And now, coming up at Tyrs House from October 14 through October 16, is the 2005 World Youth Qualification Tournament, as part of a major checkers event which includes other qualification and world championship tournaments. It seems that the enlightened people of Czechoslovakia rank mind sports right alongside physical sports!

Yunior Lopez and John Post are to represent the International Checker Hall of Fame, the American Checker Federation, and the United States in the Go-As-You-Please (GAYP) section of the World Youth Qualification Tournament--- if they can raise enough funds to be able to make the trip. The winner of this event may well be declared world youth champion, as reigning champion Clayton Nash has crossed over the age-21 barrier.

The competition is expected to be tough indeed, as the world's best young players contend for first place. But Yunior and John are no easy marks, and are expected to show well. Yunior began playing checkers in 2000 and played his first live over-the-board tournament in 2004. In addition, Yunior ably captained the American Internet Team, which this past spring played an historic electronic match with Great Britain.

John has an even longer record in the game, having attended US Nationals several times as well as playing in Arkansas state tournaments, and currently serves as president of the Arkansas State Checker Assocation.

But now Yunior and John need to raise at least $1,100 each for airfare, not to mention food, lodging, and incidental expenses. It's a costly proposition for these deserving young checkerists, and they need our help.

There are several ways to assist. You can donate directly to Yunior and John; you can contribute through the American Checker Federation Online Store; or you can purchase a US-Great Britain Internet Match Booklet from Yunior. John Post can be reached at 105 Evergreen Estates, Russellville AR, 72802. Yunior Lopez can be found at 1200 Declaration Drive, Las Vegas, NV 89110, and he is offering a match booklet to anyone who donates $15 or more. If you would rather contribute through the ACF, go to their online donation site and page down to Dream Young or Travel Fund.

Yunior summed it all up in an exclusive Checker Maven interview: "My experiences with checkers have been great and this is why I still play checkers. When you attend a live tournament it is something like no other. You are in a room with great people where you can have great conversations, great games, and overall a great time. We are ready to play!"

The Checker Maven asks you to give the future of checkers a real boost, by helping Yunior and John represent America in Prague this October.

September 19, 2005 followup: We have learned that John Post unfortunately won't be able to make the trip to Prague.

The very popular It's Your Turn online play site suffered a serious meltdown on Friday, August 19, 2005. This site, highly rated and highly recommended on our site ratings page, hosts turn-based play, counts among its membership many top-notch players, and offers a number of checker tournaments every month.

Due to a faulty backup strategy, both main files and backups were lost, and the site suffered a 10 day outage before coming back on-line on August 29, 2005. Site operator Patrick Chu spent quite a bit of money to hire a data recovery service, and they did their job well: everything except game moves was fully recovered from the crashed storage devices.

During the crisis, site management provided frequent informational updates. and presented a balanced and forthright viewpoint. They have "confessed" to less-than-stellar business practices vis-a-vis backup and recovery, and have offered to make good on lost membership time due to the site outage.

It's Your Turn has been a great place to play both casual and serious checkers, and members now have a choice: they can castigate Mr. Chu for his faults, and abandon the site; or they can realize that It's Your Turn remains a good place to find a good game.

We ourselves have been critical in the past of the site's unfortunate lack of attention to customer service. We expect that this recent experience may have turned that situation around.

It is our hope, and our recommendation, that if you are a checker-playing member of It's Your Turn, you will stay on as a member and keep playing. There is a real danger of the site losing enough membership to cause serious harm. We would surely not wish to see that happen.

The publication of the conclusion of our Did Marvin Blow the Game? story has been delayed a bit, as we're carefully editing the variations on the play of this interesting position. But never fear, you'll soon learn whether our hero Marvin prevailed, or if Louie Screwdriver got the last laugh.

Also, our on-line publication calendar has gotten out-of-date. Look for us to get that fixed up within the next week or so.

Thank you for helping to make The Checker Maven one of the world's most-read checker publications.

The Checker Maven is pleased to note that, following a period of controversy (see our previous editorial on this topic), eminent checker grandmaster Leo Levitt will be playing for the USA in the upcoming 100th Anniversary International Match with Great Britain.

More words are superfluous, so we will only say that the leadership of the American Checker Federation, spearheaded in this instance by Dr. Richard Beckwith, ACF President Alan Millhone, and Gerry Lopez, acted with honor in according Mr. Levitt the place on the United States team that he so richly deserves.

Congratulations and thanks are due all around to those who in the end upheld the best principles of our game. We recall Dr. Martin Luther King's famed expression, "It's always the right time to do the right thing" and we are proud that our ACF leaders did exactly that.... the right thing.

We're making a small change to our publication schedule, partly in response to our recent reader survey. Readers thought our present once or twice a week publication schedule was fine, with most readers saying they visit the site more or less weekly.

So, in order to maintain consistency and predictability year-round, and to help manage our publication workload while still providing quality content, we're going to a permanent Saturday-morning schedule. We're dropping our Wednesday editions in favor of providing more on Saturdays.

This means that during summer and holiday periods, you'll still see a weekly Saturday article. During the regular parts of the year, you'll see at least one article and possibly two or three, as our time, energies, and backlog allow.

We hope this small change will prove pleasing, and invite your comments.

One of the most asked-for items in our recent user survey was annotated games from recent events. We've earlier remarked that delivering on this will not be easy, and so we're looking for volunteer "stringers" among our readership and elsewhere.

Now, we know that up-to-the-minute tournament results and standings are generally posted on the Checker Solutions BBS (see link at left), or on specific websites. We're not looking to compete or "double up" in this area, and we're not looking to publish games, play, or analysis without proper permissions and clearances. We know that in a number of cases, game scores are kept in reserve for contributors.

However, having said all that, if you're in a position to provide us with timely news, play, or commentary from checker events, and doing so wouldn't be in conflict with what we've stated above, your contributions would be heartily welcomed. Full credit would be given, and in return you can have any share you want of our subscription fees. (Let's see, we learned in school that any number times zero is ....)

We hope to hear from you!

Controversy rages today, as it did nearly 80 years ago, over the selection of the US team in the upcoming 100th Anniversary US-Great Britain match, to be held in Las Vegas in September. One look at the postings on the Checker Solutions BBS tells the story... and that story has many angles and viewpoints.

In brief, the controversy is over the exclusion of venerable grandmaster Leo Levitt from the US team. As near as we can determine from the BBS postings, Mr. Levitt was originally asked to play, but a vote by a team selection group determined that Mr. Levitt should sit out in favor of a possibly younger, more recently active player.

This type of discussion is nothing new. Let's turn back to a publication we've quoted before, The Morris-Systems Checkerist for September-October 1926. At that time in checker history, the US team was being chosen for the 2nd International Match between the US and Great Britain.

The lead story in the Checkerist was titled "International Team Will Select 11th and 12th Men at Once" and bore the telling subtitle "Matches Called Off Due to Lack of Harmony Amongst Players." An article titled "An Old Timer Comments" by John H. Finn of the Lynn Item stated:

"Yes, the hand of time bears heavily upon all of us and none can escape its fierce grip. The American players are growing old, too, and sooner or later all of the great ones will be too old to get a grip on the game and hold that grip for many moves ... it cannot be said that an old man is one who would be preferred for team play. This applies generally to all who have reached that stage in life when they prefer rest rather than excitement...."

With all due respect, Mr. Finn, we think you were somewhere out in left field with your comments, and as the saying goes, you confused "retired" with "tired." And you tragically underestimated the immeasurable value of the older generation.

The Checker Maven editorial staff cannot support Mr. Finn's 1926 position vis-a-vis the 2nd International Match and likewise cannot support the 2005 decision to omit Mr. Levitt from the US team being assembled for the 100th Anniversary Match.

We base this position not on our knowledge of checkers, which our readers know is limited at best, nor on our familiarity with the players and their abilities, which is likewise circumscribed. Nor do we intend our position to be a criticism of the American Checker Federation or the team selection officials, who we believe to be acting according to what they see as their mandate. They are in an unfortunate no-win situation and will face criticism regardless of their final decision.

We base our position instead on what we learned from our father, of blessed memory, who taught us checkers many decades ago.

We learned that there are things more important than winning. While we learned to play to win, we learned to lose with sportsmanship and grace. We learned that checkers is all about honor, respect, perseverance, humility, hard work, ethics, and ultimately, wisdom. Over time, we've come to see these attributes in the checker community at large and it's cemented our relationship to the Game of Kings.

In the light of these precious principles, which make checkers much more than just a game, and all about much more than just winning, we ask if the exclusion of Mr. Levitt from the US team upholds and serves these principles; and we fear that it in fact does not. We ask whether disappointing an aging grandmaster who has contributed immeasurably to our game, and likely has much more still to offer, is in our best interests. (Mr. Levitt's record of 32 wins with only 1 loss and 45 draws in previous International matches speaks for itself.)

Likewise, we admire and applaud the offer of a young and highly skilled player, Clayton Nash, to stand aside to make room for Mr. Levitt. In making this offer, Mr. Nash models behavior and attributes that are a worthy example for us all, and acts in the true spirit of our game.

We do not know how this will all turn out in the end. But we will close with this question: if, in pursuing the goal of victory, we sacrifice our principles, what do we really win?

Reminder: we have switched to our summer publication schedule, which means we don't always publish a Wednesday edition.

Our thanks to everyone who participated in our recent Checker Maven reader's survey. We received a wonderful response, filled with constructive criticism and excellent suggestions. Overall, you seem to like The Checker Maven!

By far the most asked-for feature was current checker news and annotated games from recent tournaments and matches. This may actually turn out to be the most difficult request to deliver upon, as tournament and match games generally have specific ownership and publication rights and limitations. But we're going to try to recruit a network of volunteer "stringers" and we'll make every effort to provide this type of content in the future. Bear with us; it may take some time to put this together.

Problems proved quite popular; you were about evenly split on whether they were too hard, too easy, or about right. This tells us that our mix is good; but we agree that the speed problems are usually too simple.

Book and computer program reviews have their audience as well, although these appeal to a more focused group. Still, the response certainly indicates that we should continue with this type of material.

The most controversy seemed to be over the Marvin J. Mavin stories. Most folks thought they were at OK or better; a few people really loved them; and others--- well, let's just say that they and Marvin have a bit of a personality clash. The bottom line for us: we'll continue to run these stories but we won't focus on them or publish them more than every month or two.

The "Masked Man" features garnered one negative mention as well; we didn't get a reason but it might be that the quality of the problems in those articles tended to be lower than in the other problem features. We'll run the one or two more that are already in the publication queue, and that will probably be the end of the line unless we can upgrade the caliber.

Various and varied suggestions included requests for: easier to read diagrams, a return to the click-and-type system of commenting on articles, better indexing, and RSS syndication, among others. We plan to work on all of these over the next weeks as time allows.

Publication frequency of once or twice a week seemed about right to most of you, although there were a couple of requests for daily publication! Alas, that just can't be in the cards for the forseeable future.

As we publish this summary, we're completing a half year of regular, on-time, uninterrupted Checker Maven publication. Our thanks to our nearly 1,000 regular readers for making this webzine a success far beyond anything we ever had a right to expect. We'll do our best to continue to please and to be responsive to your suggestions and input.

The history making first ever United States-Great Britain internet match is drawing to a close, and the British team has scored a solid victory. With nine out of ten boards reporting, the score is Great Britain 7 wins, 2 losses, and 27 draws. No matter the results of the tenth board, Great Britain has won the match.

The British team was lead by solid performances by Jan Mortimer (three wins) and team captain Lindus Edwards (two wins). The only U.S. wins to date were both scored by the young American star Ryan Pronk.

Complete details can be found on the official web site. In addition, Jim Loy has been annotating the games and posting them on the message boards at the It's Your Turn site (free registration may be required to view these).

The Checker Maven congratulates the Great Britain team on a very fine victory.