A few people have asked me recently if it’s possible to have a Chess engine running alongside the live games when they are transmitted on the ICU web site. While it may be possible, it’s not an immediate priority. However, there is a little trick available to anyone with their own pgn compatible program with a Chess engine that will allow them to follow the games with an engine running.

Here’s what you do. First of all, find the live games with your browser, the current live games are from the ICU Junior Championships so we’ll use these as an example. One you have the live games displayed, look at the address bar of your browser and it should read as below

http://www.icu.ie/live/irishjuniors/tfd.htm

The final portion of this address points your browser to the file to open in a directory called “irishjuniors”, the file name is tfd.htm. If you change the file name your searching for from tfd.htm to games.pgn then your address bar should read

http://www.icu.ie/live/irishjuniors/games.pgn

When you have this address in the browser, hit enter and your browser will automatically download a file called games.pgn. This is the database of the current games and when it’s downloaded and you double click on it, your default pgn reader ( Chessbase or Fritz etc ) will open and display the games so far. You can then play through them while having your favorite engine running. You can do this as often as you like during the transmission, or even after the transmission. If you do this when all the games are over, but before a new round begins, you will get the complete games which you can then rename and keep.