Chess News

The Brazilian site, Rádio Xadrez, spoke with Judit Polgár, who will visit Brazil next month. She gives details of her life as a mother, a wife and a chess player. She also recalls important moments of her career such as her games against Anand and Kasparov, or Bobby Fischer's visit to her family. She gives valuable tips to young and upcoming female chess players.

As previously reported the special chess promotional tour of Maurice Ashley took him to Martinique, Guadeloupe and Jamaica. Today the world's first African-American grandmaster tells us about his adventures in St Croix, where a 13-year-old talent, who had recently finished the Central American Games with a perfect 7-0, had him fighting for survival in a blindfold exhibition. Also included is a nice tactical video excerpt from Maurice.

If Carlsen had hoped to demoralize Aronian with yesterday's win, the Armenian showed it takes more than that. In a good game against Gata Kamsky, Aronian built a solid advantage he never let go of until the end. Carlsen on the other hand was actually in danger of losing to Caruana at one point, but ended up drawing. Karjakin also came back to 50% with a second win over Navara.

With 148 players competing and 14 grandmasters set in NZ's southern playground, the Queenstown Classic will be a great tournament to key an eye on.

It was the clash of the titans as the top two players in the world bumped heads for first place. Magnus Carlsen scored an impressive win over Levon Aronian as he slowly built up an advantage into a convincing win. Radjabov joined Caruana and Aronian in second after a blunder by Navara. Both Harikrishna and Turov lead Group B and C respectively with 3.0/3.

Two decisive results, and two extremes. Levon Aronian declared that it was time to take his game to another level (some of us mistakenly thought 2800 was another level), and after a veritable see-saw battle against Nakamura, he had the last word and is on 2.0/2. Fabiano Caruana joined the chasers with 1.5 after he beat Karjakin, who is now on a worrisome 0.0/2 start.

The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elisabeth hosted the 2011 South African Junior Chess Championship, in which an impressive 1800+ youths participated. Efforts such as this have led to South Africa's first WGM, Melissa Greeff. To help promote chess there, Susan Polgar was invited to provide a simul as well as give a seminar on "Women in Chess".

It was a day for the young up-and-comers, though with Carlsen and Aronian in the top two, perhaps up-and-camers is more appropriate. Carlsen had an edge in an endgame against Gashimov, and sure enough weaseled his way into a win. Aronian beat Karjakin with black in a complicated and exciting game, while Giri ground down Gelfand after 70 moves.

It's nice to attack with such a magnificent white knight on f5, on the other hand here the black king also has two defensive knights for his protection. Asked concretely - what does the sacrifice 27.Rxf6+ lead to in this position?
A) victory for White;
B) perpetual;
C) advantage for Black.

Our yearly puzzle week brought us, as usual, a sack-load of emails. From January 1st to 15th they will be counted as entries to our prize contest, where you can win a signed and dedicated book and programs autographed by world champions.You increase your chances by solving the brain teaser. In addition we show you a truly unbelievable optical illusion.

The Donostia Chess Festival has just ended. It used the innovative and dynamic "Basque system", a world's first. Not only did the participants play two games at the same time; if they lost in the knock-out format the event was not over. Anastasiya Karlovich talks to the organizer and person responsible for making this idea a reality: GM Feliz Izeta, who discusses all that is Basque.

Why the exclam? Because it was not Vugar Gashimov, the super-GM rated 2761 and ranked number nine in the world, who went through the high-class field of 13 GMs, three rated over 2700. It was rather his older brother and manager Sakhan, who does not have a FIDE title and is rated 2351 (= 3834th in the world).

This beautiful event was won by Russian GM Aleksandr Shimanov, who is also a singing talent. Our reporter Alina l'Ami started with a 1-0-1-0-1-0-1 tic-tac-toe score, but then drew a game and won her last one to pocket her third IM norm. Amazing, since the Romanian WGM spent a lot of time exploring the delights of the Swedish capital. Here's her big illustrated report.

A new and very commendable women's live rating list of top players is being maintained by the Russian chess news portal ChessPro. Fired by this list we did a little additional research to find out how many female players there are in the top 100 and top 1000. What would you estimate? And what are the possible reasons for the superiority of males in certain intellectual activities?

After four rounds, he stood at a mere 1.0/4, but a fantastic comeback with 5.0/6 allowed 17-year-old Anish Giri to take sole first after his rivals, Nakamura and Morozevich, both of whom had better tiebreaks, lost in the final round. Moro came second, while Nakamura took third. Guramishvili won the women's event ahead of Sharevich and Brunello. Final report, photos and games.

In this position the first player couldn't resist and with 41.Qxh6 made a spectacular queen sacrifice. After its acceptance with 41...gxh6 42.e6+ ...

A)... White wins in all lines;
B)... best play produces a perpetual check;
C)... Black prevails.

As proof that Vas Rajlich had copied program code the ICGA presented pages and pages of Fruit and Rybka code side by side. But, according to Dr Søren Riis, what was labeled as Rybka code was actually fabricated to look like Fruit. He criticizes the ICGA's process failures and ruminates on the reasons behind the unprecedented vendetta launched against the star chess programmer.

Normally, the news would be that Morozevich beat Nakamura (which he did) and is now right behind (which he is), followed by Giri in third, but Ivanchuk stole their thunder. In round seven, visibly haunted by his loss to Giri, he dropped a piece against Vitiugov in such a way that spectators were left gaping. In round eight, against Caruana, he just flipped and literally tried to give away all his pieces!

The SportAccord World Mind Games ended in a great success for all the games and participants, drawing top players in all disciplines. After the Rapid competition in chess, there were blitz competitions, won by Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Hou Yifan respectively, followed by blindfold competitions in which Zoltan Almasi snatched the gold, while Yifan took her second.

When one thinks of events such as the European Rapid and Blitz championships, the names that come to mind are invariably part of the 2700 club. However, this event is one that also breaks the barriers of rating, age, and gender, ranging from 84-year-old Stanislaw Szczepaniec all the way down to five-year-old Helena Kucharska, who played in both tournaments.

In January 1999 the main topic of conversation amongst top players like Kasparov, Anand and others: who was the mysterious German chess amateur, rated below 2000, who had won a strong Open ahead of GMs and IMs, with wonderfully courageous attacking chess and a 2630 performance? How had he done it? Turns out it was with unconventional methods, as subsequent investigation uncovered.