4/23/2024 – A couple of weeks ago Leon Mendonca turned 18. After many spectacular successes — like a 9.0/9 score in a very strong GM Open a year ago and winning the Challegers group in Wijk aan Zee — Leon just won the Spring Chess Classic 2024 at the Saint Louis Chess Club – outright. The round robin event had ten grandmasters with an average rating of 2625. This remarkable young player has recorded a very interesting FritzTrainer for us. | Photos by Austin Fuller

4/16/2024 – Jan Markos is a Slovakian grandmaster and successful author. In addition to several books, he has now recorded a much acclaimed Fritztrainer course. Stefan Liebig spoke to the author and trainer about the secrets of effective chess training.

4/3/2024 – Following the success of the inaugural World Rapid Team Championship held in Düsseldorf in August 2023, FIDE decided to organize a second edition, which will also include a World Blitz Team competition. The tournament will be held in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, between August 1 and 6, and is expected to bring together a number of top world professionals and chess enthusiasts. Magnus Carlsen has already confirmed that he will be playing for the defending champions, WR Team.

3/28/2024 – It is quite difficult to find the right trainer for a chess player. More so when there are so many lucrative options available. While some prefer to work on their own, others need a chess coach to guide and help them improve their game. Peter Long shares his experiences and thoughts as a trainer. Instead of focusing on gaining more knowledge, attending camps and playing tournaments incessantly, creating a structure will help students to fix their gaps and become stronger players.

3/25/2024 – Dutch IM Robert Ris is a much sought-after coach in his home country and is also a very prolific author. Mario Ziegler took a look at his latest FritzTrainer — one focused on tactics — for Glarean Magazine. “Calculation Training - Sharpen your Game” is a nice collection of new tactics exercises. The reviewer concluded: “Robert Ris has a pleasant style of presentation and responds to the reader’s probable solution suggestions”.

3/12/2024 – It is quite a difficult task to find the right trainer for a chess player. More so when there are so many lucrative options available. While some prefer to work on their own, others need a chess coach to guide and help them improve their game. FM Peter Long shares his experiences as a trainer, including the most frequent challenges he had to face. Chess has evolved as a sport over time, which means the training aspect of the game has also changed. | Photo: European Chess Union - Education Commission

3/10/2024 – The ChessBase opening tutorials are a compact, quick introduction to opening theory. They will soon be available in full in the new ChessBase book format. Volume one on the open games (1.e4 e5) has already been published. In an interview with Stefan Liebig, chess trainer and grandmaster Dorian Rogozenco explains the concept: "Memorising variations is a thing of the past". | Photos: German Chess Federation

3/4/2024 – The ultimate chess companion bundle: Fritz 19 paired with the Fritz Powerbook 2024. Elevate your game with Fritz 19's advanced AI and deep analysis tools that challenge and teach players of all skill levels. Then, take your strategy to the next level with the Fritz Powerbook 2024, offering over 25 million openings, variations, and patterns derived from real-world games and top-level matches. Together, they provide an unparalleled chess training experience, combining tactical depth with a vast knowledge base to sharpen your skills and strategies like never before. This bundle is now €139.90 instead of €179.90!

2/18/2024 – In the United States and Canada, February is Black History Month, a tradition that began in 1926 and seeks to commemorate important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. A good occasion for US Chess National Master and renowned coach Jerald Times to draw attention to the growing number of successful black chess players and the history of black chess players in the United States. | Photo: Rochelle Ballantyne | Source: YouTube, Stanford 125, Rochelle Ballantyne

2/17/2024 – Magnus Carlsen defeated Fabiano Caruana with the white pieces to claim overall victory at the first edition of the Freestyle G.O.A.T. Chess Challenge. The Norwegian took home the US$ 60,000 first prize for his efforts. Levon Aronian grabbed third place after beating Nodirbek Abdusattorov, while Alireza Firouzja secured an invitation to the next edition of the event by beating Gukesh D in the fight for fifth place. | Photo: Nils Rohde / ChessBase

2/16/2024 – The second World Corporate Chess Championship will consist of a series of online events that will conclude with an over-the-board final in New York in June. The event is open to teams representing legally recognized companies from all around the world. Every team has a right to include one invited player who is not directly employed at the company or is a member of the board.

2/10/2024 – Nodirbek Abdusattorov was the top scorer in the rapid stage of the Freestyle G.O.A.T. Challenge in Germany. The Uzbek prodigy was the only player to remain undefeated in the single round-robin, and got to collect four wins in seven rounds, including a fine positional victory over Magnus Carlsen. Vincent Keymer finished second thanks to his great performance on Friday, while Fabiano Caruana climbed to third place after collecting 2½ out of 3 points on the second day of action. | Photo: Amruta Mokal

2/7/2024 – Magnus Carlsen won the Chessable Masters after defeating Alireza Firouzja in the Grand Final Reset of Division I. Firouzja started the day with two wins in a row, and obtained a draw in game 4 to set up a rematch. In the Reset, however, it was Carlsen who scored first. Firouzja then failed to make the most of an advantageous position, as he allowed Carlsen to turn the tables and get a 2-0 final victory.

1/31/2024 – Fritz 19 has opened a whole new area, the ChessBase Cards Exchange. There are now trading cards with motifs and information from many areas of the chess world. Cards can be acquired in various ways and traded on the market: "Trade corld champion for a stamp..."

1/30/2024 – The 2024 Chessable Masters is the first of four Champions Chess Tour events and determines one of the players who’ll make it to the in-person CCT Finals. The event starts on January 31 at 11:00 ET/17:00 CET. Magnus Carlsen, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Vladimir Fedoseev already earned spots in the Chessable Masters Division I based on their performance in last year’s AI Cup.

1/26/2024 – From the 1960s to the 1980s, Klaus Darga and Hajo Hecht, together with Wolfgang Unzicker, Lothar Schmid, Robert Hübner and Helmut Pfleger, formed the backbone of the German national team. Hajo Hecht and Klaus Darga will soon be celebrating their 85th and 90th birthdays, respectively. Helmut Pfleger recalled their long-standing friendship in his latest column for "Die Zeit", one of the most influential and renowned weekly magazines in Germany. | Photo: Karin Darga

1/20/2024 – A brainchild of Chokri Saidi, a French-Tunisian entrepreneur, the Djerba Chess Festival aims to combine chess, friendship, culture and tourism on the beautiful island of Djerba, the largest island off the coast of North Africa — which is also known as the ‘island of dreams’. Furthermore, Saidi has gone a step further in his chess organizing pursuits and, from this year, he is also organizing the prestigious Jeddah International Youth Chess Festival. Diana Mihajlova informs.

1/17/2024 – Many consider Garry Kasparov to be the greatest chess player of all time. As well as being a fantastic player, he has done a lot to promote the game of chess. In 2011, he founded the Kasparov Chess Foundation, a non-profit organisation that aims to bring the many benefits of chess to children and adults around the world. The recently launched Kasparov Chess Foundation Academy offers attractive courses to raise your level of play. There's still time to register!

1/16/2024 – Last Tuesday, this young lad turned 15. Shreyas Royal gained his IM title in 2022, the youngest English player to do this. As a result he was invited to the London Chess Classic in December. There he was the lowest ranked player, but finished with 2630 performance, 226 points above his FIDE rating. In the Hastings Congress he missed his third GM norm by a whisker. It is time to take a closer look at this bright young talent, from whom we will be hearing a lot in the future. | Photo: Olympics.com

1/14/2024 – Chess legend Vlastimil Hort turned 80 on Friday. In a short interview, he talks about when and how he learned to play chess, which player he admired the most, why he left the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and what he thinks of online chess tournaments. | See also: Vlastimil Hort, the great chess entertainer, turns 80! by Eduard Frey

1/13/2024 – The new Champions Chess Tour (CCT) season kicks off this month with the return of the Chessable Masters and a faster format. Chess.com’s premier year-long event now consists of four main online tournaments, increasing the intensity leading up to the live season-ending Tour Finals.

1/11/2024 – It's an experiment. We wanted to know how a number of different personalities reacted to some unusual problems we presented in our Christmas Puzzle week. So we gave them two positions and let them wrestle with them online. For starters, we bring you video of a super-talent, Leon Luke Mendonca, and his first-time encounter with anything like this. Did you react in similar fashion to the problems?

1/5/2024 – How did you fare with the three fun-to-solve puzzles we provided on December 30? They were fairly subtle, one quite amuzing. We got them from Gauri Shankar is a FIDE Master with eight IM norms. He lives in Chicago and produces entertaining video shorts explaining problems and studies. You can watch them for the solutions to our Christmas selection.

12/28/2023 – Kasparov Chess Foundation Academy is proud to announce stellar events in January 2024, that promise to elevate your chess game to unprecedented heights. Brace yourselves for insightful and strategic wisdom from two of the world's top chess players: Grandmaster Ramesh RB and Grandmaster Alexander Motylev.