Luke McShane

I have a pet theory, based not on hard data but on insights from postmortem chitchat. My theory says that novices and experts, when facing evenly matched opponents, make roughly the same number of screw-ups in a game. The difference is that the novice’s oversights will be far more significant. The novice walks into checkmate,

If you visit the English Chess Federation’s website hoping to become a member, you will be confronted with a comprehension test. You will scroll past walls of text before appraising your membership options. Would you like to be a Supporter, Bronze, Gold, or Platinum member? Perhaps you are eligible for Junior Bronze, Free Junior Bronze,

Garry Kasparov endorsed the slower time control which was used at the Superbet Chess Classic. That event, which concluded this month in Bucharest, was the latest leg of the Grand Chess Tour, the annual series of events for elite players which comprises a mix of faster and slower formats. In the words of the former

There is a sublime satisfaction in a good detective thriller. We will, of course, have accessed the same facts as our sharp-witted sleuth. The fleck of yellow paint on the raincoat meant little to us, as did the creaking door and the page missing from the notebook. But at last the alibi is dismantled, and

The English Championships concluded last weekend in two dramatic playoff matches. In the open event, Gawain Jones defeated last year’s winner Michael Adams by 1.5-0.5. The first game saw Adams pressing in a complex queen endgame, but he lost after an astonishing oversight which allowed mate in one move. Though Adams pushed hard for a

‘OK, there is a body with a knife there, and the police come and say nothing happened… You have to find who, why, what, but it happened, don’t pretend that it didn’t happen!’ Vladimir Kramnik deployed that analogy about the world of online chess, which he sees as riddled with cheating. Cheating happens. Once in

Lawyers in a courtroom, it is said, should not ask questions to which they do not already know the answer. Chess players are well advised to adopt a similar attitude to pawn endgames – steer clear unless you can anticipate the outcome with certainty. In endgames with more wood on the board, overlooking a nuance need

‘Back to the Future with Casablanca Chess’ was the tagline for the elite rapid tournament held in Morocco last month. The intriguing premise was that games would begin from positions taken from the opening phase of famous historical games. The four guinea pigs for this experiment – dubbed the Casablanca Chess Variant – were Magnus

The top Emirati grandmaster Salem Saleh is an imaginative, dynamic player whose games are a treat to watch. But his win at the recent Sharjah Masters against Vladimir Fedoseev (formerly Russian, but now representing Slovenia) was surely the artistic highlight of his career. The combination which ends the game is dazzling, but both players deserve credit

England teams brought home an Aladdin’s cave of medals from the European Senior Team Championship, which concluded in Slovenia last week. Their victory in the over-65 section was particularly convincing. The team of John Nunn (reigning world senior champion 65+), Tony Kosten, Peter Large, Chris Baker and Nigel Povah lost just two games out of 36,