Pictured: pminear vs Chronatog (Peter Minear v Nick Long), Reversed Chess at 2002 World Open
I first began my atomic chess pages way back on 21 July 2002 and they were hosted at one of my old websites, wild5.org. I had actually begun some study of atomic chess prior to that time, but after starting my website, I studied atomic chess a lot more. The site has transformed itself over the years since it was founded and even the material itself has transformed and improved. I've rewritten the entire site several times and it's currently in its third edition as of April 2009.
Click here if you want to read more about the history of this site.
Pictured: pminear vs Chronatog (Peter Minear v Nick Long), Reversed Chess at
2002 World Open
I first learned of atomic chess when I registered at MEWIS-2 around April/May of 1998. Obviously, I was a rather poor atomic player at first! I was around the 1700-1800 level and had no knowledge whatsoever of atomic theory, or even of basic principles of atomic chess apart from things go boom when a capture was made. But during the spring of 1999, I discovered Vlasov's Atomic Page and began learning more about the principles of atomic without a teacher. I didn't have very much to go on, just the Atomix book and whatever atomic games I could scrounge up from various players at GICS, DICS, and MEWIS-2.
If we backtrack a bit, I did TD one of the 1998 Atomic World Championship matches and did watch all of the matches that occurred. That doesn't mean I understood the games or even the basic tactics that were going on during them. I do vaguely recall some very odd positions that seem familiar today, such as a reverse Hook position in a few of the games. But I did play a few games, mostly against Atomix(C) because it was always available at MEWIS and at the time, it was rather hard to find players online at the same time as you were.
I happen to have saved one of the only early games of atomic I played, but this was well past the time I learned about Vlasov's site and I was actually playing at a decent level at this point in time (pun intended) - my handle in this game was "Time":
| Time (2196) vs. Helenep (2340) --- Thu Oct 21, 0:13 MET DST 1999 Rated Atomic match, initial time: 3 minutes, increment: 2 seconds. Move Time Helenep ---- ---------------- ---------------- 1. e3 (0:06) e6 (0:03) 2. Nh3 (0:14) f6 (0:05) 3. Nc3 (0:04) c6 (0:04) 4. Na4 (0:10) d5 (0:12) 5. Nc5 (0:04) Bxc5 (0:02) 6. d4 (0:12) Nh6 (0:03) 7. f3 (0:44) Ng4 (0:03) 8. fxg4 (0:10) h5 (0:02) 9. Bd3 (0:08) g6 (0:03) 10. Qf3 (0:04) e5 (0:06) 11. dxe5 (0:05) d4 (0:06) 12. e4 (0:05) Bg4 (0:44) 13. Qg3 (0:06) Qd6 (0:07) 14. Bc4 (0:25) Bf3 (0:14) 15. Qe5+ (0:15) Bxe4 (0:12) 16. Bf4 (0:07) Qb4+ (0:30) 17. c3 (0:04) Qa4 (0:07) 18. Bf7+ (0:07) Kd7 (0:38) 19. Be8+ (0:05) Ke7 (0:15) 20. Bd6+ (0:02) Ke6 (0:01) 21. Bd7+ (0:01) Kf7 (0:02) 22. Be6+ (0:01) Ke8 (0:02) 23. Bf7+ (0:02) Kd8 (0:02) 24. Be7+ (0:01) Kd7 (0:02) 25. Be6+ (0:01) Ke8 (0:02) 26. Bd7+ (0:02) Kf7 (0:01) 27. Bxf6 (0:01) {Black checkmated} 1-0 |
 FEN: rnbqk2r/pp4pp/2p1pp2/3p4/3P2n1/4PP1N/PPP3PP/R1BQKB1R Position after 7. ... Ng4 Just looking over this game of mine from 1999 makes me shudder. We were both using the Atomix opening book as the basis for our theoretical knowledge, but obviously, Helenep has a better grasp of atomic chess principles than I did at this point.
It seems that I really didn't grasp basic atomic concepts. Just look at me exploding my own Queen with Qe5+, allowing Bxe4! I'm not sure if this is brilliant or sheer idiocy by myself. |
 FEN: rn5r/pp1BBk2/2p2pp1/7p/q2p4/2P5/PP4PP/R3K2R Position after 26. ... Kf7 White explodes Black's king with Bxf6 - which was recorded in the MEWIS-2 game log as "checkmate", rather than the more modern logging standard of "Black's king exploded". |
I eventually ended up with the following rating line at MEWIS-2: Atomic 2296 32.1 146 52 3 201 2422 (01-Oct-00) - I achieved both the AM (Atomic Master) and AGM (Atomic Grand Master) titles using the MEWIS-2 title system, and the following old news items were posted:
315 (Sun, Oct 01) Chronatog (2358) is now AM!
NEWS 315 (Sun, Oct 01) Chronatog (2358) is now AM!
Playing black in his promotion game (number 150) against pminear, Chronatog has
\ reached the Atomic rating 2358, which gave him the AM title. Well done! :-)
\ The MEWIS Rating Daemon.
316 (Sun, Oct 01) Chronatog (2407) is now AGM!
NEWS 316 (Sun, Oct 01) Chronatog (2407) is now AGM!
Playing white in his promotion game (number 165) against Helenep, Chronatog has
\ reached the Atomic rating 2407, which gave him the AGM title. Well done!
\ :-) The MEWIS Rating Daemon.
After playing at MEWIS-2 and achieving the AGM title there, I began my quest to search out other places to play atomic chess at. I began at the Dutch Internet Chess Server (DICS) but was unable to find any players online at all and probably only got to play 1 or at most 2 games there. I think I lost both of these on time (no timeseal). I moved on to the German Internet Chess Server (GICS), registered as Mirror, and then played whoever was available. I ended up with the following rating line:
GICS: Atomic 2177 144.5 32 0 0 32 2177 (23-Jul-02)
I also have some games from GICS that I played.
Around 2000-1, US Chess Live! (USCL) was a fledging chess server that had licensed its code from FICS. For a few months, atomic wasn't added to the list of variants available, although the source code was freely available as GICS had made it available as part of its code. It took a couple of years of lobbying but finally USCL integrated atomic chess into its codebase thanks to DAV, who was an employee of GamesParlor at the time. Atomic was added to USCL on 22 August 2002. It took me only a few days to reach the 2400 atomic rating at USCL (thanks to my years of practice). I reached the 2400 rating level on 01 September 2002. You can view all the games I played at USCL between its addition to the codebase to my reaching the 2400 level here. (Simply rename as a PGN file if you want to view in a PGN viewer)
In preparation for the addition of atomic to USCL, I began my atomic chess website (which you are currently viewing) on 21 July 2002. The first thing I did was prepare an illustrated opening book study of the Atomix book - which allowed me to analyze the book somewhat in depth. I learned that there were some bad lines in there and that there were some new lines that weren't included in the book. But I think what really helped me most as a player was starting to analyze the endgames available in atomic. I won many games based on my knowledge of atomic mates / endgames, rudimentary as they were at the time. Eventually, I was able to reach the 2600 level and maintain my play there for approximately about two years. Then when I quit online chess and analysis of atomic chess, I missed out on several new developments and my current strength I would say is still fluctuating, depending on my current theoretical knowledge. I've been as low as 1800 and as high as 2500 in the years since 2003.
My final USCL ratings were (I had two accounts there):
(As Moon): Atomic 2606 128.9 832 311 45 1188 2625 (02-Dec-2002)
(As Angel): Atomic 2444 105.9 714 299 39 1052 2520 (03-Oct-2002)
Now, before, during, and slightly after the USCL atomic addition, several small servers popped up that offered atomic. This section will be covered more extensively elsewhere on the site, but the sites included ZICS, DNCS, chess-square, and icchess.net. I do have some games from chess-square and also some from icchess.net. I also have a screenshot of my handle from icchess.net (Exo):
(Eagle-eyed readers will notice an interesting variant - "Crazywild5" - you can read a rant about that variant elsewhere on the site after I've written it!)
Needless to say, atomic on icchess.net wasn't very challenging. At least on chess-square, I was playing ComboKid! Now that's some old school stuff there.
Anyway, moving on, FICS added atomic chess on/around 16 February 2003. I had "retired" my account of Chronatog on FICS, which is a story for another time, so I decided to play on a duplicate account called "Wuf". I managed to go 65-1 with a 2513 rating but was immediately banned. You can see what it was like to be banned as Wuf on the log. Nevertheless - I continued to play atomic chess on FICS for several years after coming back as Chronatog, but my strength has fluctuated on FICS throughout the years. Here's some statistics:
FICS (Wuf - final rating): Atomic 2513 93.5 65 1 0 66
FICS (Chronatog): Atomic 2222 109.0 365 151 21 537 2372 (11-May-2003)
(This was as of 11 April 2005)
The above is my Atomic-Chess Playergraph from wildchess.org. It doesn't list dates but as you can see, I sat at about a 2222 rating for several years, leading to a spike to the 2500 rating level in late February 2008. A sample game at wildchess.org would be this one. Right now, I don't play on FICS anymore and doubt I will ever play again, so those statistics will be frozen for me. Some final ratings from FICS:
Pre-Wipe #1: Atomic 2500 72.7 701 456 46 1203 2500 (24-Feb-2008)
Pre-Wipe #2: Atomic 2112 58.4 164 133 13 310 2229 (15-Jul-2008)
All of the above has been for traditional atomic chess. ICC added a variant of atomic chess to their site on/around 2001 that has no check rule. This alters the game of atomic chess fundamentally and will be addressed in a special bonus section on this site in the future. But as a small bonus, here's some statistics for my play on ICC around October 2008:
>Atomic (w27) 1928i 60 38 1 99 1991
Currently, I play correspondence atomic chess on SchemingMind. Correspondence is a lot harder than speed atomic chess! To laugh at my rating changes through time, take a gander. They do also have the very fun Atomic960 variant, which is exactly what it sounds like - Atomic Chess mixed with Fischer Random! Do I smell the new wave of the future?
I've also earned the Senior Master title on every server that offered a server title, except on SchemingMind. I'm just a lowly master there for the time being. But that's okay, I mean I crushed everybody in 2002 and it's quite a few years past my peak as an unofficial World Champion. I managed to bridge the gap between the Golden Era (got to play a few of the masters from that era) and I'm originally a Silver Era player that's continued to play sporadically throughout the years.
Now - let's hear about you! How do you like this site? Any suggestions or feedback? Hate mail? Drop me a line! nick.longNOSPAM@hotmail.com (remove the NOSPAM)
[First Edition : 11 April 2005 -- Nick Long]
[Second Edition: 30 April 2009 -- Nick Long]
[Last Modified : 18 May 2009 -- Nick Long]
© 2005-9 Nick Long
