Ancient Web: Tim Krabbé Made Chess Weirdness into a 1998 Reference Shelf

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Chess has an official history of world champions and famous matches. Tim Krabbé wanted the stranger parts: unlikely sacrifices, players resigning positions they could win, accidental masterpieces, and moves no sensible-looking plan would predict.

Visit Tim Krabbé's Chess Curiosities.

The main page is a dense index of his essays. Among its subjects are promotions to rooks and bishops, Alekhine's five-queen game, the legend of Saavedra, the weirdest chess coincidences, and chess records. Readers are invited to email the author with corrections or questions.

A particularly valuable early document is The 110 Most Fantastic Moves Ever Played. The final installment carries a November 20, 1998 date and explains why Krabbé disagreed with a British Chess Magazine shortlist of remarkable moves.

The annotated move was the web page

Krabbé says the series began when Alexei Shirov played a startling bishop move against Veselin Topalov in Linares in 1998. That inspired him to collect moves whose discovery required an imaginative leap rather than merely a spectacular sacrifice.

The resulting top-ten page does not just give a list of names. It supplies game scores in algebraic notation, numbered diagrams, and navigation between moves, inviting readers to follow the position through the game. For the top ten, he includes examples from games involving Anand, Ivanchuk, Bronstein, and other notable players.

The old site also offers chess records and entries about obscure players who produced moments of extraordinary creativity. Some pages remain linked through an older XS4ALL hosting arrangement; not every destination is guaranteed to remain accessible.

Modern chess websites tend to present engine evaluations, databases, and automatically generated opening repertoires. Krabbé's project is different: a writer using a browser to build an eccentric annotated museum, with judgments that readers are welcome to dispute.

The later main index mentions developments as late as 2022, so the collection is not one frozen snapshot. Its 1998 essays remain readable as dated documents from the early online chess community.

Its historical value is not a claim that every ranking is objectively correct. It is the preservation of the reasoning and careful game records behind one enthusiast's delightful choices.

Read the 1998 fantastic-moves finale and browse the Chess Curiosities index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.