Magnus Carlsen has risen to achieve the highest ever chess rating. He ascended to 2872 on the rankings, which compares with 2851 for Kasparov, 2785 for Bobby Fischer and 2817 for Viswanathan Anand, the reigning champion. Carlsen commences his multi-million-dollar challenge for the world chess title against Anand in Chennai on 9 November. Carlsen is
Magnus Carlsen is seeking to become the 16th world chess champion in a line that includes such giants as Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky and Garry Kasparov. The $5 million World Chess Championship will be a clash between the reigning Indian world champion Viswanathan Anand (defending champion from the World Chess Championship 2012 and twice winner
Andrew Paulson, an American who lives in London, has been responsible for a remarkable chess revolution over the past year. He commissioned a YouGov study which showed that more than 600 million people worldwide regularly play chess. Paulson proceeded to raise sponsorship funds to stage two of the best chess tournaments ever held in London
Former world champion Garry Kasparov has announced that he will stand for president of Fidé, the World Chess Federation, next year. He is challenging the incumbent, the colourful Kirsan Ilumzinov, former president of Kalmykia. The adjective ‘colourful’ is very much an understatement. An openly declared friend of Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi, it looked like
Grandmasters Pal Benko and Viktor Korchnoi have worn dark glasses to counter perceived hypnotic influence during games. In the recent Sinquefield tournament in St Louis, Hikaru Nakamura resorted to the same measure against Magnus Carlsen. In the past Naka has fared badly against Carlsen, but this time he held the draw. Maybe there is something in
I am sorry to hear that the Australian master Max Fuller has died in Sydney at the age of 68. For about a decade Max was a fixture on the British chess scene and the high point of his career came when he was within just one move of tying for first prize in the
The recently concluded Fide (World Chess Federation) World Cup held at Tromso in Norway resulted in a triumph for Vladimir Kramnik. The ex-world champion’s form has been variable this year, including shared first place in the London Candidates’ tournament, with Carlsen, but a disastrous last place finish in the Tal Memorial in Moscow. Kramnik missed
It is often said that the great chessboard artist, Polish Grandmaster Akiba Rubinstein, was afflicted during tournament play by an imaginary fly, which he sought in vain to swat away. As is the nature of imaginary beings, a case in point is the A Bao A Qu, the first entry in the bible of such
Nowadays it is standard, when publishing a chess game, to give the names of both players. This was not always the case. In the 19th century it was quite common to reveal the winner’s name while leaving the loser identified solely as ‘anon’ for anonymous. Occasionally this was for the perfectly good reason that the
The great Svetozar Gligoric passed away last week at the age of 89. Gligoric represented Yugoslavia at a time when that nation was second only to the USSR in terms of chess strength. Three times a world title candidate, Gligoric was able to defeat such champions as Fischer, Botvinnik, Tal and Petrosian. Petrosian seemed to
The Hedgehog is a respected chess formation, usually adopted as Black, where the defender crouches behind a wall of pawns on the third rank, spines abristle, fending off any hostile aggression until the time comes to unfurl and deploy the fretful porpentine’s armoury in earnest. Since the Hedgehog is essentially a defensive ploy, it is
Britain’s top grandmaster Mickey Adams has won clear first prize in the tournament at Dortmund, ahead of former world champion Vladimir Kramnik. The full final scores (out of 9) were as follows: Adams 7; Kramnik 6½; Leko and Naiditsch 4½; Andreikin, Meier, Wang Hao and Caruana 4; Khenkin 3½; Fridman 3. The last time
David Howell turned in a sparkling performance in the 100th British Chess Championship in Torquay, which finished last week. In 2009 Howell also won at Torquay, so he must be hoping that the English Chess Federation selects the home town of Fawlty Towers as the permanent future venue for the British Championship. Scores at the
England’s leading female player, Jovanka Houska, recently called for a memorial to the late Tony Miles. The timing is fitting. Miles won the British championship in 1982 and the centenary British Championship concludes this weekend in Torquay, the scene of Miles’s victory. The year after he won the championship, Miles also triumphed in the
Lothar Schmid, chess grandmaster, the world’s greatest collector of chess books and the only arbiter trusted by Bobby Fischer, died earlier this year, and the chess world lost one of its great characters. Schmid (born 1928) officiated as arbiter at three of Fischer’s matches, including the 1972 Match of the Century, where Fischer wrested
On Monday next week the centenary British Championship commences at the Riviera International Centre in Torquay. The leading contenders are as follows: Gawain Jones, David Howell, John Emms, Mark Hebden and Keith Arkell. I first qualified for the British Championship by winning the Southern Counties title in 1967. However, since I had been selected to
Although he has never won the World Championship, Vassily Ivanchuk is the scourge of the world’s elite. In his day he has defeated Karpov, Kasparov, Anand, Carlsen and Topalov, usually in spectacular victories. A new book, which I highly recommend, catalogues Ivanchuk’s most impressive wins, accompanied by outstandingly deep and instructive annotations. White: Vassily
As previously reported, 45-year-old Boris Gelfand, the oldest player in the tournament, convincingly won the Tal Memorial in Moscow. This week’s game was Gelfand’s third and final win against the American grandmaster who had been his chief rival for top honours. Commendably, Gelfand sought early complications with a sharp line of the Sicilian Defence which
A disturbing pattern has emerged in the games of world champion Viswanathan Anand. As White in the Ruy Lopez he has begun to disregard in serial fashion the precept that ownership of the bishop pair, against two opposing knights or knight and bishop, tends to confer a major advantage. Not only do the bishops act
The Israeli grandmaster Boris Gelfand celebrated his 45th birthday last Monday (24 June) with outright victory in the Tal Memorial elite super-tournament in Moscow. Given that Gelfand has recently tied first in the Alekhine Memorial in Paris, this means that over a total of 18 games against the world’s best in these two competitions, Gelfand has
