Luke McShane is chess columnist for The Spectator.
White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Andrii Sergiienko, Fide Youth Composing Championship 2023. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 9 October. 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
A queen and king can force mate against a lone king – that is as fundamental as it gets. Almost all regular players know that to be true, and they also know how to execute it. But players are regularly confronted by the distinction between ‘knowing that’, and ‘knowing how’. Many know that king, bishop
Silman-McFarland, Reno 1991. White is clearly in control. Which move did he play to decide the game? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 30 September. 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
Novice chess players can seem spellbound by the power of their own queen, zigzagging hither and thither in desperate search of bounty. You soon learn that on the chessboard strength is weakness and weakness is strength; the queen must flee from any attack while a pawn is, well, only a pawn in your game. Experienced
White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by C.G.S. Narayanan, K. Seetharaman, 2017. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 25 September. 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
The former world champion Vishy Anand has described the current crop of young Indian talents as a golden generation. At last month’s Fide World Cup, four of the quarter-finalists were Indian. Most eminent was 17-year-old Gukesh, who recently entered the world top ten, narrowly overtaking Anand himself. Praggnanandhaa, 18 years old, went as far as
White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Philip Hamilton Williams, 1894. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 18 September. 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…Qd7! deflects the
Hans Niemann is back. The American grandmaster drew worldwide attention last year when he was alleged to have cheated by Magnus Carlsen. Niemann responded with a $100 million defamation lawsuit against various parties. That was dismissed by a federal judge in June, though Niemann could still have pursued some of his claims in a state court.
Black to play. Wall-Raczek, Northumbria Masters 2023. Black’s next move brought the game to a swift close. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 11 September. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks
‘How do you become a grandmaster?’ ‘You must climb the mountain, and defeat the opponent at the top.’ Alas, the answer is not nearly so succinct, and when I get asked the question, I remind myself to spare the finer details. The gist is that you must outperform an ‘average’ grandmaster over the course
White to play. Liu-Adhiban, Abu Dhabi Masters2023. White’s next move secured a decisive advantage. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 4 September. 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.
A fortnight ago, I wrote about Magnus Carlsen’s narrow escape against the German teenager Vincent Keymer at the Fide World Cup in Baku. That brush with mortality seemed to galvanise the world no. 1, who coasted to the final with convincing victories in his next three matches, against Ivanchuk, Gukesh and Abasov. His next opponent was
White to play. Steiger-Stebbings, European Senior Team Championship, 2023. White played 1 h2-h4, and a draw was agreed a few moves later. What opportunity did he overlook? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 28 August. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a
England teams brought home a raft of medals from the European Senior Teams Championship, held last month in Swidnica, Poland. England’s first team were top seeds in the over-50s event, with an all-grandmaster lineup (Mark Hebden, John Emms, Keith Arkell, Glenn Flear and Chris Ward). They faced a serious challenge from Slovakia, whom they defeated
White to play. Erigaisi-Azarov, Baku 2023. The Bh6 looks in trouble, but Erigaisi found a powerful move to decide the game in his favour. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 21 August. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include
If you love chess enough to play hundreds of tournaments you will, sooner or later, play like a numbskull. You lick your wounds, go to bed, and hope the engine belches into action the next day. As a wise man once told me, the great comfort of a knockout tournament is that if you play
White to play and mate in two. Composed by Sam Loyd, Lynn News, 1859. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 August. 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
Three cheers for last week’s news leak, indicating government plans to support English chess. According to Dominic Lawson, the president of the English Chess Federation (ECF) and The Spectator’s former editor, his conversation with Rishi Sunak, setting out the significant role played by chess players in the wartime codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park, proved particularly
White to play. Edward Jackson-John Merriman, British Championships, 2023. Black has just captured a rook on e2 with a pawn on f3, presumably expecting imminent resignation. Which move allowed White to turn the tables? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 7 August. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of
Three protagonists shaped the action at the British Championships, held at De Montfort University in Leicester last month, with sharply different stories to tell. ‘Business as usual’ was a fair description of the top seed Michael Adams’s performance, who was undefeated on 7.5/9 and secured his eighth championship title by a comfortable margin. His closest