And instead of saying “I am” it says “I A-M”.

It made me giggle.

Now, with regard to that specific picture, what do you think: would male chess champions dress sloppily for such a photo?

You know what’s really, really sad?
The first thing through my mind was still, “Ooh, she’s pretty.” Which, to be shallow, I suppose gives you another reason to follow women’s chess.
http://www.kosteniuk.com/albums/sashaalmiraxmas05/pictures/img_1374b.html

This raised some annoying conflict for me:
On the one hand, why do I want presumably highly intelligent women NOT to wear revealing/shapely dresses and NOT to have to be sexualised? Is that too not an act of sexism, by having a clear divide of “stupid, sexy” and “smart, plain”? On the other hand, isn’t it always undue pressure on any girls to have this “be pretty” constant expectation on top of being a Chess Grandmaster Vice Champion?

That stiff drink is a good recommendation.

It allows you not only to play chess with a huge number of computer opponents of every conceivable difficulty, but it also has a large library of lessons that you can go through. They start with basic fundamental ideas (capture towards the center, trade when you are up in material) and can take you through rather complex strategies. These lessons are annotated by, for the most part, either Josh Waitzkin or Bruce Pandolfini. Waitzkin is a young guy, in his 20’s or 30’s. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” Waitzkin is the young boy that movie focuses on. Pandolfini was Waitzkin’s mentor for most of his career.

The best part, in my opinion, are the annotated games by Waitzkin. He verbally takes you through a number of his games that he believes show certain themes. There’s a large portion he entitles “The Psychology of Chess” where he analyzes a number of games where the mental state the players were in had a huge influence. If you want to get an inside look at the psyche of high level chess players, Chessmaster is the way to go.

Ubi Soft, the creators of Chessmaster, have released ten versions to date. The latest one, Version 10, I haven’t used but doesn’t appear to be quite the same. I would suggest getting Chessmaster 9000, the second most recent version. I own it and love it. It can be found on Amazon.com for only $10. Really a great investment.