Magnus Carlsen’s run of nine straight wins at the Grenke Freestyle Open was, even by his own standards, extraordinary. The world no. 1 is a zealous advocate for freestyle chess, in which the pieces on the first rank are placed in one of 960 possible configurations at the start of the game. The format has
Women’s world champion Ju Wenjun has scored a convincing 6.5-2.5 victory over her challenger Tan Zhongyi in the Women’s World Championship match, held in China earlier this month. Tan took an early lead by grinding out a minuscule advantage in the second game, but Ju levelled the scores with an equally patient win in the
Good, but why now? Did they only just notice? Those were my thoughts when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. I’m similarly pleased and bemused by the new BBC series Chess Masters: The Endgame. I recall evenings after school more than 30 years ago, watching the Kasparov-Short world championship match in
I like tournaments which award prizes for the best game, offering a welcome reminder that there is more to chess than points on the scoreboard. Naturally, who wins those is a subjective matter, and even what you call the award is up for debate. Should it be a ‘best game’ prize, in the sense of
Almost 400 players, including more than 100 grandmasters, travelled to the European Individual Championships last month in Eforie Nord, a small Romanian town on the coast of the Black Sea. Dozens of players have a realistic shot at winning this fiercely competitive event, which in recent years was won by players seeded 33rd, 11th, 20th
The best of Aesop’s fables is the one in which the Wind and the Sun compete to remove the coat from a passing man. The Wind goes first, assaulting the man with full force, but the harder it blows, the tighter the man grips his coat. When the Sun takes a turn, it radiates such
The vast majority of winning blows in chess are delivered by a piece moving forwards. Powerful retreating moves are rare, but the very fact of going against the grain makes an aesthetic impact. Played for purely strategic reasons, such moves are all the more admirable, so I was duly impressed by a move played in
England’s over-65 team triumphed at the World Senior Team Championships, held in Prague last month. They began this event as second seeds behind the German team Lasker Schachstiftung, whose strongest player Artur Yusupov, originally from the Soviet Union, was once ranked third in the world. That crucial England-Germany match ended in a 2-2 tie, but
Back in 2008, Boris Spassky paid a visit to Bobby Fischer’s grave in Iceland. ‘Do you think the spot next to him is available?’ he mused. Last week, Spassky died too, at the age of 88. The two world champions were rivals, but also the unlikeliest of friends. Spassky was born in Leningrad in 1937,
Forty minutes, two problems to solve. Earlier this month I was seated in an examination hall at Harrow school in London, taking part in the final of the Winton British Chess Solving Championship. This was the second solving challenge of the day: two ‘mate in 3’ problems. The first (see the puzzle below) was a
Freestyle Chess (also known as Fischer-Random, Chess960, or Chess9LX), is the variant in which pieces on the back row are shuffled in one of 960 configurations at the start of the game. Until now, it has been regarded as a novelty. Standard chess offers a great starting position, in that there are countless ways to
‘Praggnanandhaa rallied to win the playoff’ is what I wrote last week, as though there were nothing more to say. That came after a humdinger of a final round at the Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee, in which ‘Pragg’ and world champion Gukesh Dommaraju both lost their final games but nevertheless shared first
The Tata Steel Masters is one of the most prestigious elite events, now in its 87th edition. As the gong chimed for the start of the round in the Dutch town of Wijk aan Zee last Sunday, two Indian teenagers remained in contention for first place. One was the newly crowned world champion Gukesh Dommaraju, unbeaten
Fide, the international chess federation, awards a succession of titles on the way to grandmaster (GM) status – Candidate Master (CM), Fide Master (FM) and International Master (IM). These are significant milestones which usually represent years of effort, so it almost never happens that a player can ‘jump’ to grandmaster level without first becoming an
My first round game from the first edition of the London Chess Classic in 2009 remains a vivid memory, not least because it ran for 163 moves and nearly eight hours. (I won!) England’s premier international event returned for its 14th edition in December, having skipped two pandemic years, with new sponsorship from XTX markets, and
Besides the controversial anticlimax at the World Blitz Championships, in which Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi agreed to share the title, there were several old-fashioned tournament winners to celebrate in New York. China’s Ju Wenjun, the reigning women’s world champion in classical chess, won her first women’s world blitz championship. The women’s world rapid championship, held
‘To share is to do’, as no Latin proverb dared to suggest. The 2024 Fide World Blitz championship, held in New York just before the new year, awarded gold medals to both Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi when their final match remained tied after seven games. The last three games were played in ‘sudden death’
Cast your mind back to April 2023, when Ding Liren from China became the world champion, defeating Ian Nepomniachtchi in Astana. After 14 seesaw games, Ding triumphed in a rapid tiebreak, in which his move 46…Rg6! from the final game was a memorable piece of brinkmanship, living dangerously and pushing for the win. December 2024 saw
1) Which former US women’s chess champion, who in 1961 became the first chess player to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, died earlier this year? 2) This year a boy from Argentina became the youngest ever to be awarded the International Master title, at the age of ten years and eight months. He
It may sound strange to say that Ding’s win in the first game of his world championship match came as a shock, but it did. His recent form had been shaky and his challenger Gukesh, heavily favoured by pundits, had the advantage of the white pieces. There was every reason to expect Ding to stick
