chess

Ladies, gentlemen and androids are all in action in four major events currently in progress. In the women's world championship in Spain, Zsuzsa Polgar leads Xie Jun by 31/2-21/2, coming back from one point behind with wins in games four and five. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Garry Kasparov is locked in battle with Deep Blue, the billion-bytes- a-second IBM super-computer. With 256 parallel processors, Deep Blue could be up to 1,000 times faster than any previous chess computer. Awesome, but the fact that it still doesn't really know what it is doing makes Kasparov a clear favourite.

In Belgrade, the other world champion, Anatoly Karpov, began poorly with 11/2 from 3, and has just been told that the event will stop after round five. Finally, in Estonia, Nigel Short leads the field in a strong Paul Keres Memorial Tournament. More of all these events later in the week.

Here is the game that brought Zsuzsa Polgar into the lead in the women's championship. In the final position, either 25...Rxd5 or Bxd5 is demolished by 26.Rc7.

Zsuzsa Polgar-Xie Jun: 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 Bc5 5 Nxc6 Qf6 6 Qd2 dxc6 7 Nc3 Be6 8 Na4 Rd8 9 Bd3 Bd4 10 c3 b5 11 cxd4 bxa4 12 Qc2 Qxd4 13 Qxc6+ Kf8 14 Be2 Ne7 15 Qc2 f5 16 0-0 Qxe4 17 Qxc7 Kf7 18 Bh5+ g6 19 Bf3 Qc4 20 Qxa7 Qd4 21 Qa5 Qd4 22 Rd1 Qc4 23 Bg5 Rd7 24 Rac1 Qxa2 25 Bxd5 resigns.