Tournament on virtual chess was held during the international IT exhibition "IndoBalt 2000".
During the international information technologies exhibition
"InfoBalt 2000" organized by "InfoBalt" association not only IT professionals and businessmen came, but also chess masters. The national chess team both of men and women came to the exhibition before going to the airport where they had to take a plane to Istanbul, Turkey, to chess Olympics. Also the virtual chess tournament in
www.chess.lt was organized by
JSC "Penki kontinentai" Ltd.
Virtual tournament lasted for all afternoon. The youngsters from Kaunas, Klaipëda, Ðiauliai, Radviliðkis, Vilnius, mostly the pupils of chess spots schools and clubs, participated with their accompanying teachers. The group of young chess masters contested among each other, but this tournament was more representative rather than tough and long duel between young sportsmen.
In the evening the winners were clear of this mini tournament. Salomëja Zaksaitë was the winner in girls group; she has already achieved some good results in adult women contests. Vitartas Valdëjus from Radviliðkis became the winner in boys group.
Recently the virtual chess receives much attention of society. While Copyright agency has a lot of discussions and solves problems of illegal software usage and distribution, chess players have their own headaches. It is not easy to define the identity of a person who you are playing on-line with, also nobody can be sure that one is not playing with the help of chess grandmaster, if speaking about amateur tournaments, or even a special chess computer program.
These kind of programs can do miracles, just remember the lost of Worlds Grand master Gary Kasparov to the super computer "Deep Blue". Speaking about future, virtual tournaments and even Olympics are absolutely possible, but the same problems exist: either the moves are made by human intelligence or by light-fast computer program. When this dilemma is solved, chess masters will not need to go to other countries in order to participate in various international tournaments and even Olympics – it’ll be possible to win or to lose sitting by the own computer at home.
The best fact that chess are really popular both in the World and Lithuania is chess Olympics organized every two years. That is because the chess is still not recognized as a summer Olympics sport. Of course there are people who think that this game should not be recognized as Olympic sport. So far chess is the most humanist sport, causing no traumas and based on human mind and intellect. Everything what human can perform physically will be nothing with animal's capabilities, but what human can do with his mind and intelligence, the things he has full power on, cannot be compared with anything. This kind of thought was expressed by one of the tournament participants.
The representatives of JSC Penki kontinentai Ltd. accompanied the adult national chess team to Istanbul, Turkey. There they are to face different level of mastership teams, because more than 170 countries participate in Olympics.