Luke McShane

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, 1857. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 23 November. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qg7+!!

I own a few chess books that could serve as a murder weapon, but none so hefty as Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games. Nicknamed ‘The Brick’ by its fans, its thousand-odd pages forgo instructional text in favour of an escalating procession of puzzles, mostly mates in 1, 2 or 3 moves. These illustrate the

‘It’s chess. We’re all prima donnas.’ You can hear it spoken with a wink in the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, released two weeks ago in seven episodes of about an hour. My heart swelled to hear the game’s essence so appreciated: of course nothing else matters when you’re playing chess. So yes, we are

Geometry shmometry. The pirouette of a knight may be pleasing to the eye, but sometimes what I really crave is a demolition. I don’t mean a smash-and-grab king hunt. I want to see a crumbling edifice, a colossal concrete barrier wilting beneath a torrent of water, as in The Dam Busters. On the chessboard, diagonal

It’s over. Magnus Carlsen’s undefeated streak in classical chess has finally come to an end, after 125 games. It is hard to exaggerate what an unlikely accomplishment this is: Carlsen faced top-flight opposition in almost every game, winning 42 and drawing 83. He was beaten by the Polish grandmaster Jan-Krzysztof Duda at the Altibox Norway

We are what we do. Alas, in its zeal to suppress the virus, this government would have many people doing not very much. Since March, many musicians, actors, sportspeople and more have had precious few opportunities to perform. In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell claimed that the hundreds of live performances played by the

I can’t tell you why the Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian was found guilty of cheating last month, because I don’t know. The event was the 2020 PRO Chess League, an online team event organised by Chess.com. Petrosian (not to be confused with his namesake, who was World Champion in the 1960s) was playing for the

It is nigh on seven months since I sat opposite a flesh and blood opponent, so I expected to feel unusual playing my first games in the Schachbundesliga, Germany’s team competition. I had no special concern on grounds of health. German case numbers look (relatively) low, the playing hall was cavernous, to facilitate social distancing,

Send in haste, repent at leisure. It is a cruel certainty that you will sooner or later text your intimate thoughts to the wrong person, or hit ‘reply all’ by accident. The second you spot this, your heart will leap into your mouth. That sensation is much like how a mouse slip feels during an

Nothing courts us so nimbly as technology. Perhaps the chess computers have already won you over — I am dazzled by the riches they have revealed. For a jaw-dropping sense of wonder, try playing over a forced mate in 549 moves. Still, many yearn for a simpler time. A time when the mysteries of chess

It was as baffling to me as quantum entanglement. Every time the Algerian player on the Zoom call shared his screen, my own screen share would stop working. That we were playing in separate matches was beside the point — this was online chess under something like exam conditions, and the software glitch left me