3/22/2015 – Remember our recent article on a clandestine effort to recruit top players from other countries to switch their allegiance to the United States, to help win team championships like the Chess Olympiad? Well, Comedy Central's inimitable Jon Stewart picked up on the New York Times report and did a five minute sketch on chess, one that is simultaneously insulting and funny.
new: ChessBase Magazine 225
Chess Festival Prague 2025 with analyses by Aravindh, Giri, Gurel, Navara and others. ‘Special’: 27 highly entertaining miniatures. Opening videos by Werle, King and Ris. 10 opening articles with new repertoire ideas and much more. ChessBase Magazine offers first-class training material for club players and professionals! World-class players analyse their brilliant games and explain the ideas behind the moves. Opening specialists present the latest trends in opening theory and exciting ideas for your repertoire. Master trainers in tactics, strategy and endgames show you the tricks and techniques you need to be a successful tournament player! Available as a direct download (incl. booklet as pdf file) or booklet with download key by post. Included in delivery: ChessBase Magazine #225 as “ChessBase Book” for iPad, tablet, Mac etc.!
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The Daily Show is an American late-night talk and news satire television program which airs on Comedy Central. The host is Jon Stewart, who started up as a stand-up comedian, but branched into television and took over The Daily Show 1999, making it more strongly focused on politics and the national media. It describes itself as a fake news program and draws its comedy and satire from recent news stories, political figures and media organizations. The Daily Show has won 18 Primetime Emmy Awards.
The show typically opens with a long monologue from Jon Stewart relating to recent headlines and frequently features exchanges with one or more of several correspondents, who adopt absurd or humorously exaggerated takes on current events against Stewart's straight man persona. In Friday night's show they picked up the news that a clandestine effort was under way to recruit top players from other countries to switch their allegiance to the United States – see our report from last week:
The Daily Show – Chess News Roundup
"This week in chess America is making a concerted effort to buy top foreign chess players in an attempt to win next year's Chess Olympiad gold medal, something it has not done in decades" Stewart says. "The United States is buying up nerds! Nerd mercenaries – nerdcenaries." He turns to his "senior correspondent" Trevor Noah, who patiently explains to Stewart what is going on.
Of course the show cannot resist poking fun at the stereotype allegation that chess is boring – but at least with the clever line: "I did not realize how boring chess was until someone else started talking about it." It is hard not to laugh an exchange, towards the end, where a chessboard floats down and the two start a game:
"Because I'm white I'll go first," says Trevor Noah. Jon Stewart does his trademark long baffled look and then replies: "All right, I guess 'cause I'm Jewish I'll go second?!"
Eagle eyed readers have bound to have spotted it already. It is our long held theory that there is a certain malicious advisor who offers his service as a "chess expert" to all TV shows and film productions, and then makes sure that the board is always set up the wrong way. The number of times this occurs cannot be attributed to pure chance.
Magnus Carlsen on the Colbert report
In our blurb spoke of "the inimitable Jon Stewart". That is not strictly accurate. A number of his "senior correspondents" have gone on to make their own shows, in a similar format – most recently John Oliver with Last Week Tonight on HBO. The late-night talk and news satire television program The Colbert Report aired on Comedy Central from October 2005 to December 2014 with a total of 1,447 episodes. The following one is memorable:
Three years ago Magnus Carlsen was invited to the Colbert Report. The show focuses on a fictional anchorman character named Stephen Colbert who is a "well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot." You can read our report on the above segment here. In addition we finally succumb to temptation:
We have long resisted publishing this fairly crude impersonation – but you have probably seen it elsewhere
Frederic FriedelEditor-in-Chief emeritus of the ChessBase News page. Studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. In 1986 he co-founded ChessBase.
You will learn how Black's dynamic piece activity and structural counterplay more than compensate for White's extra tempo in the colour-reversed setups.
In this course, you’ll learn how to take the initiative against the London and prevent White from comfortably playing their usual system by playing 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bf4 Nh5.
London System Powerbase 2026 is a database and contains in all 11 285 games from Mega 2026 and the Correspondence Database 2026, of which 282 are annotated.
The London System Powerbook 2026 is based on more than 410 000 games or game fragments from different opening moves and ECO codes; what they all have in common is that White plays d4 and Bf4 but does not play c4.
In this course, Grandmaster Elisabeth Pähtz presents the London System, a structured and ambitious approach based on the immediate Bf4, leading to rich and dynamic positions.
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