Yuri Averbakh had a wry explanation for why he was made chairman of the USSR Chess Federation in 1972. There was a feeling that Boris Spassky, the Soviet world champion, would lose his title to Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik that year. Nobody else wanted to deal with the fallout, so Averbakh got the job. Whatever
There is a video in which a small group of students amble about passing a basketball back and forth. The instruction at the start is to count how many times the players pass the basketball. Then comes the punchline – did you see the gorilla? Halfway through, a figure in a gorilla suit walks through
In the dying seconds of an online blitz game, I promoted a pawn and instantly regretted it. There was nothing wrong with the move, but the extra second spent on choosing and clicking the queen was more than I could spare. A few flailing moves later, my time ran out. Of course, I had forgotten
There are lessons in chess that cannot be learned from a book. One lands, from time to time, in a position which amounts to a trial by fire – a test of conviction as much as skill. The experience of such a game can stay with you for ever, radically altering your sense of what
Wesley So won the final Fide Grand Prix, which was held in Berlin earlier this month. But it was Hikaru Nakamura, his defeated opponent in the final, who had the most to celebrate. Since he won the opening leg in February, in reaching the semi-final Nakamura secured a coveted spot in the Fide Candidates tournament,
Sergey Karjakin won’t be playing much chess for a while. Last month, the Russian grandmaster’s Twittering jingoism in support of the invasion of Ukraine drew such universal scorn that his international invitations were bound to run dry. Karjakin challenged Magnus Carlsen for the World Championship in 2016, and had earned a spot in Fide’s forthcoming
The 140th edition of the Varsity Match took place last month at the Royal Automobile Club in London’s Pall Mall. This one was as tense as they come: Cambridge grabbed an early point, but Oxford built a significant lead by winning the next three. On the four boards which remained, Oxford’s situation looked precarious, so
Three summers ago, I was invited to the Swedish city of Eskilstuna, for a brief but exciting match against their top player, the affable Nils Grandelius. Earlier this month, Grandelius visited London, this time to play a match against my England team-mate David Howell. The England-Sweden Challenge match was staged as part of the 30th
Richard Rapport took first place at the Fide Grand Prix in Belgrade last weekend. The Hungarian grandmaster is now almost assured of a place in the Candidates tournament in Madrid later this year, which will determine a challenger for the World Championship. Only a very unlikely outcome at the final Grand Prix event (which begins
I do not, as a rule, go looking for a fight on a Sunday morning. Chess, if it must be played at all, should be approached with due caution. My game plan tends to be pretty simple: deploy the pieces onto sensible squares and hope that the coffee kicks in before anything interesting happens. Usually
The Champions League final has been moved from St Petersburg to Paris and the Russian Grand Prix in Sochi cancelled. It was obvious that the Chess Olympiad, to take place in Moscow in July and August, could not continue as planned. Last week, this was confirmed by Fide, the international federation, and it is reported
Hikaru Nakamura justified his wildcard invitation by taking first place at the Fide Grand Prix in Berlin this month. The American grandmaster has become the world’s most popular chess streamer, and had not played a slow game in more than two years. But he looked fresh and relaxed, and evidently the steady practice of elite
Contemplating a lost position is a bit like having sauce down your shirt. It is annoying in itself, but worse, it often comes with a sting of embarrassment. We chess players are a proud lot, and losing is an affront to our dignity. And what do your dining companions make of it? You might jokily
One tradition at the annual Gibraltar Masters is a high-spirited skittles match played in the evening between teams of men and women, dubbed the ‘Battle of the Sexes’. In 2020, to much amusement, the women won a playful miniature after the flamboyant 3…f5 quickly backfired: 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bc4 f5 4
World championship match play has a stony logic, where there are no prizes for glorious endeavour. It calls to mind the old joke about two hunters who encounter a bear. One puts on his running shoes. ‘You can’t outrun a bear,’ objects his friend. ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to
When Magnus Carlsen won last year’s Meltwater Champions Tour, they made two trophies. One was for Carlsen, and the second was auctioned online, fetching a sum in digital currency of around $25,000. The trophy only exists as a video showing a stack of rotating gold squares, like a Donald Trump skyscraper from the future. If
Here’s a challenge which appeared in a German chess magazine in 1848: place eight white queens on an empty chessboard so that no two queens occupy the same file, rank or diagonal. In other words, none of the queens may defend each other. Perhaps you start with a queen in the top left corner, on
Recently, with some regret, I declined an invitation to play chess in the Netherlands. I fancied the trip, but alas it made little sense to commit to what would have been a fleeting visit. Travel hurdles have become a Rumsfeldian ‘known unknown’, and sure enough, that country was in lockdown not a week later, requiring
Chess offers one ultimate consolation in defeat: the opportunity to set the pieces up and start again. At least in theory, a new game is a clean slate, and a release from past tribulations. But in practice, sometimes one simply cannot manage to air out the miasma of what came before. In the second half
1. ‘I like the game, the money, and the fame.’ Which Twitter-loving top grandmaster said that, in response to an interviewer’s question: ‘What three things do you absolutely love about chess?’ 2. Which former women’s world champion chose to sue Netflix, seeking damages of ‘at least $5 million’ for her portrayal in The Queen’s Gambit?
