PELE(BLACK PEARL)

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"Black Pearl" was the name given to - Pele(retired Brazilian footballer).





Edson Arantes do Nascimento , better known as Pelé , name given as Edison on birth certificate, born 21 October 1940 – however, Pelé himself claims that he was born on 23 October, is a retired Brazilian footballer. He is regarded by many experts, football critics, former players, current players and football fans in general as the best player of all time. In 1999, he was voted Football Player of the Century by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS). In the same year French weekly magazine France Football consulted their former Ballon D'Or winners to elect the Football Player of the Century. Pelé came in first place. Pelé was elected "Athlete of the Century" by the International Olympic Committee and Reuters News Agency in 1999, and by French newspaper L'Équipe in 1981. During his playing days Pelé was for a period the best paid athlete in the world. According to the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS) he is the most successful league goal scorer in the world, with 541 league goals. In total Pelé scored 1281 goals in 1363 games. In his native Brazil, Pelé is hailed as a national hero. He is known for his accomplishments and contributions to the game of football. He is also acknowledged for his vocal support of policies to improve the social conditions of the poor (when he scored his 1,000th goal he dedicated it to the poor children of Brazil). During his career, he became known as "The Black Pearl" (Pérola Negra), "The King of Football" (O Rei do Futebol), "The King Pelé" (O Rei Pelé) or simply "The King" (O Rei).

He was trained since birth to become great by his father, mentor and former footballer (who was the top scorer in every season he played for, for every team) Dondinho. Later spotted, at Bauru Atlético Clube, by football star Waldemar de Brito, Pelé began playing for Santos at 15 and his national team at 16, and won his first World Cup at 17. Despite numerous offers from European clubs, he could not leave Brazil because of a law keeping him there. In 1961 President Jânio Quadros had Pelé declared a national treasure, thus enabling Santos to keep Pelé for almost two decades until 1974. With Pelé within their ranks, Santos reached their zenith by winning the 1962 and 1963 Copa Libertadores, the most prestigious club competition in South American football. In 1962 Santos became the first football club ever to win four out of four competitions in a single year, thus achieving the quadruple. Pelé’s electrifying play and penchant for spectacular goals made him a star around the world. His team Santos toured internationally in order to take full advantage of his popularity. Pelé played most of his career as a deep-lying forward. Pelé's technique and natural athleticism have been universally praised and during his playing years he was renowned for his excellent dribbling and passing, his pace, powerful shot, exceptional heading ability, and prolific goalscoring.

He is the all-time leading scorer of the Brazil national football team and is the only footballer to be a part of three World Cup-winning squads. In 1962, his second World Cup victory, he was on the Brazilian squad at the start of the World Cup but because of an injury suffered in the second match, he was not able to play the remainder of the tournament. In November 2007, FIFA announced that he would be awarded the 1962 medal retroactively, making him the only player in the world to have three World Cup winning medals.

Since his retirement in 1977, Pelé has been a worldwide ambassador for football and has undertaken various acting roles and commercial ventures. In August 2010, he was named the Honorary President of the New York Cosmos.

Country

• Roca Cup: 1957, 1963
• FIFA World Cup:
  • Winner: 1958
  • Winner: 1962
  • Winner: 1970
• Copa América:
  • Runner-up: 1959
• Cruz Cup: 1958, 1962, 1968
• Bernardo O'Higgins Cup: 1959
• Atlantic Cup: 1960
• Oswaldo Cruz Cup: 1958, 1962, 1968

Club

• Copa Libertadores (2): 1962, 1963
• Intercontinental Supercup (1): 1968
• Supercopa de Campeones Intercontinentales (1): 1968
• Intercontinental Cup (2): 1962, 1963
• Campeonato Brasileiro Série A (6): 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1968
• Torneio Rio-São Paulo (4): 1959, 1963, 1964, 1966
• Campeonato Paulista (10): 1958, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1973

New York Cosmos

• North American Soccer League, Soccer Bowl (1): 1977
• North American Soccer League, Atlantic Conference Championship (1): 1977

In total Pelé has 40 official titles.

PRAKASH PADUKONE

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Prakash Padukone father of Deepika padukone was a famous player of - Badminton.




- Prakash Padukone is a former Indian badminton player from Karnataka. He won the All England Championship and became the first Indian to do so. Prakash was awarded the Padma Shri in 1982.

Prakash Padukone (born June 10, 1955) is a former Indian badminton player from Karnataka. He won the All England Championship and became the first Indian to do so. Prakash was awarded the Padma Shri in 1982. He, along with Geet Sethi, has co-founded Olympic Gold Quest which is a Foundation for the Promotion of Sports in India. Prakash Padukone's life story has been chronicled in the biography 'Touch Play', by Dev S. Sukumar. The book is only the second biography of any badminton player.

He currently lives in Bangalore with wife Ujjala and two daughters Deepika Padukone, an actress and Anisha Padukone, a golfer. He runs the Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy. He was awarded the Arjuna award in 1972.

Career

Prakash was initiated into the game by his father Ramesh Padukone, who was the Secretary of the Mysore Badminton Association for many years.

Padukone's first official tournament was the Karnataka state junior championship in 1962. Though he lost in the very first round, two years later he managed to win the state junior title. He changed his playing style into a more aggressive style in 1971, and won the Indian national junior title in 1972. He also won the senior title the same year. He won the National title consecutively for the next seven years. In 1978, he won his first major international title, the men's singles gold medal at the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Canada. In 1979, he won the Evening of Champions at the Royal Albert Hall, London....

In 1980, he won the Danish Open, the Swedish Open and became the first Indian to win the men's singles title at the All England Championship with a victory over Indonesian rival Liem Swie King. He spent much of his international career training in Denmark, and developed close friendships with European players such as Morten Frost.

After his retirement in 1991, he was the chairman of the Badminton Association of India for a short while. He was the coach of the Indian national badminton team from 1993 - 1996.

Major achievements

CHESS

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The country that first played chess was - India.

Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a chessboard, a checkered gameboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and intournaments.

Each player begins the game with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. Each of the six piece types moves differently. Pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent's pieces, with the objective to 'checkmate' the opponent's king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. In addition to checkmate, the game can be won by the voluntary resignation of the opponent, which typically occurs when too much material is lost, or if checkmate appears unavoidable. A game may also result in a draw in several ways, where neither player wins. The course of the game is divided into three phases: opening, middle game, and endgame.

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The first official World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his title in 1886; the current World Champion is Indian chess Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand. In addition to the World Championship, there are the Women's World Championship, the Junior World Championship, the World Senior Championship, the Correspondence Chess World Championship, the World Computer Chess Championship, and Blitz and Rapid World Championships. The Chess Olympiad is a popular competition among teams from different nations. Online chess has opened amateur and professional competition to a wide and varied group of players. Chess is a recognized sport of the International Olympic Committee and international chess competition is sanctioned by the World Chess Federation (FIDE), which adopted the now-standard Staunton chess set in 1924 for use in all official games. There are also many chess variants, with different rules, different pieces, and different boards.

Since the second half of the 20th century, computers have been programmed to play chess with increasing success, to the point where home computers can play chess at a very high level. In the past two decades computer analysis has contributed significantly to chess theory, particularly in the endgame. The computer Deep Blue was the first machine to overcome a reigning World Chess Champion in a match, when itdefeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Setup

Chess is played on a square board of eight rows (called ranks and denoted with numbers 1 to 8) and eight columns (called files and denoted with letters a to h) of squares. The colors of the 64 squares alternate and are referred to as "light" and "dark" squares. The chessboard is placed with a light square at the right-hand end of the rank nearest to each player, and the pieces are set out as shown in the diagram and photo, with each queen on a square of its own color.

The pieces are divided, by convention, into white and black sets. The players are referred to as "White" and "Black", and each begins the game with 16 pieces of the specified color. These consist of one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns.

Movement

White always moves first. After the initial move, the players alternately move one piece at a time (with the exception of castling, when two pieces are moved). Pieces are moved to either an unoccupied square or one occupied by an opponent's piece, which is captured and removed from play. With the sole exception of en passant, all pieces capture opponent's pieces by moving to the square that the opponent's piece occupies. A player may not make any move that would put or leave his king under attack. If the player to move has no legal moves, the game is over; it is either a checkmate (a loss for the player with no legal moves) if the king is under attack, or a stalemate (a draw) if the king is not.

Each chess piece has its own style of moving. In the diagrams, the dots mark the squares where the piece can move if no other pieces (including one's own piece) are on the squares between the piece's initial position and its destination.

Moves of a king a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h

Moves of a rook a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h

Moves of a bishop a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h

Moves of a queen a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h

Moves of a knight a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h

Moves of a pawn a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h

• The king moves one square in any direction. The king has also a special move which is called castling and involves also moving a rook.
• The rook can move any number of squares along any rank or file, but may not leap over other pieces. Along with the king, the rook is involved during the king's castling move.
• The bishop can move any number of squares diagonally, but may not leap over other pieces.
• The queen combines the power of the rook and bishop and can move any number of squares along rank, file, or diagonal, but it may not leap over other pieces.
• The knight moves to any of the closest squares that are not on the same rank, file, or diagonal, thus the move forms an "L"-shape: two squares vertically and one square horizontally, or two squares horizontally and one square vertically. The knight is the only piece that can leap over other pieces.
• The pawn may move forward to the unoccupied square immediately in front of it on the same file, or on its first move it may advance two squares along the same file provided both squares are unoccupied (black "●"s in the diagram); or the pawn may capture an opponent's piece on a square diagonally in front of it on an adjacent file, by moving to that square (black "x"s). The pawn has two special moves: the en passant capture and pawn promotion.

Promotion

When a pawn advances to the eighth rank, as a part of the move it is promoted and must be exchanged for the player's choice of queen, rook, bishop, or knight of the same color. Usually, the pawn is chosen to be promoted to a queen, but in some cases another piece is chosen; this is called under promotion. In the diagram on the right, the pawn on c7 can be advanced to the eighth rank and be promoted to an allowed piece. There is no restriction placed on the piece that is chosen on promotion, so it is possible to have more pieces of the same type than at the start of the game (for example, two queens).

Check

When a king is under immediate attack by one or two of the opponent's pieces, it is said to be in check. A response to a check is a legal move if it results in a position where the king is no longer under direct attack (that is, not in check). This can involve capturing the checking piece; interposing a piece between the checking piece and the king (which is possible only if the attacking piece is a queen, rook, or bishop and there is a square between it and the king); or moving the king to a square where it is not under attack. Castling is not a permissible response to a check. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent; this occurs when the opponent's king is in check, and there is no legal way to remove it from attack. It is illegal for a player to make a move that would put or leave his own king in check.

End of the game

Although the objective of the game is to checkmate the opponent, chess games do not have to end in checkmate—either player may resign which is a win for the other player. It is considered bad etiquette to continue playing when in a truly hopeless position. If it is a game with time control, a player may run out of time and lose, even with a much superior position. Games also may end in a draw (tie). A draw can occur in several situations, including draw by agreement, stalemate, threefold repetition of a position, the fifty-move rule, or a draw by impossibility of checkmate (usually because of insufficient material to checkmate). As checkmate from some positions cannot be forced in fewer than 50 moves (such as in the pawnless chess endgame and two knights endgame), the fifty-move rule is not applied everywhere, particularly in correspondence chess.

Time control

Chess matches may also be played with a time control, mostly by club and professional players. If a player's time runs out before the game is completed, the game is automatically lost (provided his opponent has enough pieces left to deliver checkmate). The duration of a game ranges from long games played up to seven hours to shorter rapid chessgames, usually lasting 30 minutes or one hour per game. Even shorter is blitz chess, with a time control of three to 15 minutes for each player, andbullet chess (under three minutes). In tournament play, time is controlled using a game clock that has two displays, one for each player's remaining time.