Christmas Competition! As promised, here is a chance to win a super prize: Alexandra’s wonderful new talking chess computer “Alexandra the Great“, made by Excalibur Electronics! All you need to do is solve the two puzzles in the left column and send the correct answers to Alexandra, and you may be lucky! Alexandra will pick the winner at random on January 15, 2004. Several other prizes will be given free to people with the correct answer. More than 10 prizes will be given! Is that not a good way to start 2004? Happy holidays from Alexandra and www.kosteniuk.com!

Alexandra would like to wish to all a most Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year 2004 filled with love, happiness, and success in all you do. May 2004 be much better than 2003 and may all your dreams come true! Thanks for your support during the year. Tomorrow we will announce a special Christmas competition, with a super prize – keep posted! 🙂

Alexandra was in Chicago to give a 40-board Goodwill Simul to the wonderful kids of the K-12 Scholastics Championships. Every kid who played Alexandra got 3 free gifts, and the high point of the day was the Balmain Challenge give-away, in which 3 Swiss watches worth $500 each were given as prizes to the best players! Two kids managed to win against Alexandra: Partha Vora (4th grade) and Chris Williams (8th grade) and took away their Swiss watches, bravo! Out of the 3 draws, Alexandra gave a watch to Fernando Spada (1st grade), who showed great potential! Alexandra’s travel, time and gifts were entirely donated by Alexandra to help develop chess in America. The beautiful watches and pens are gifts of the Swiss watch company Balmain to whom we are all grateful. We have photos of the simul, almost all the kids, and the book signing event here. If you see yourself or your kid, just send us an email, and we will mail to you that photo for free to you! Enjoy! If you’d like to support Alexandra to do more events like this, please donate to Alexandra’s Chess Fund!

We hope you will enjoy our new web design (which will come online this afternoon) and the improved javascript menu (which opens up when you move your mouse over it, allowing you to move down and select menu items). Please let us have your comments, and let us know if it does not work in some situations (which platform, which browser, which version). Enjoy!