5/19/2021 – This week Merijn van Delft takes a look at the Chinese Championship and presents a wild tactical win by Wei Yi. | Merijn's show is available on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here.

5/19/2021 – Playing over-the-board but entering the moves of the game into a computer to play online against an opponent who is playing in an entirely different location, all supervised by an arbiter - that is Hybrid Chess. After the first hybrid tournaments the players now share their impressions. But feedback from the Mitropacup participants reveals mixed attitudes about hybrid chess and the rules that were applied, writes Stefan Löffler. | Photo: Peter Sadilek | Photo: Stefan Löffler

5/19/2021 – The latest iteration of the renowned program belongs to the strongest chess engines in the world, especially now that it draws its strength from the tremendous tactical power of a classic Alpha Beta engine, combined with deep positional play drawn from an advanced neural network. It also has different modes of play which you may find very interesting. For instance in MCTS mode it will show you not which is the objectively best move, but the one that gives the opponent the best chance of going wrong.

5/19/2021 – Svitlana Demchenko is a 17-year-old, Canadian WIM, and chess coach. Here and now, she will teach us plenty of smart moves on the board, ranging from tactics, strategies, openings, and anything else chess related. In the process, I'm happy to be available as a student at club player level, and pester the female international master with questions. Anyone who wants to strengthen their chess skills is welcome to watch, and actively replay the positions from the video, on our chessboard.

5/19/2021 – Already a well-known figure in the world of chess, Tanitoluwa Emmanuel Adewumi made mainstream headlines after becoming a National Master at the Fairfield County Chess Club Championship tournament in Connecticut. The 10-year-old was a Nigerian refugee living in a homeless shelter in Manhattana and is now pursuing the dream of becoming the world’s youngest grandmaster. | Photo: Epoch Times

5/18/2021 – In his "Weekly Show" IM Lawrence Trent takes a look at the Chinese Championships, and his feature game is the nice technical victory Ju Wenjun, who played in the open section, achieved against the eventual winner Yu Yangyi. | Lawrence's show is available on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here.

5/18/2021 – One year ago the ChessBase Magazine introduced a new column, the "Special". It offers room for a wide range of topics, e.g. Dorian Rogozenco's video presentation of rediscovered Kasparov games in ChessBase Magazine #195, "My favourite Fischer game" (CBM #196), "Kasparov as challenger" (CBM #198), "My favourite game of Paul Keres" (CBM 199) or how people remember the young Magnus Carlsen (CBM #200). The current issue #201 focuses on a player who has been among the world's best for more than three decades: Vassily Ivanchuk. The "Ivanchuk Special" in CBM #201 includes 22 games from 1987 to 2019. As a sample we show two of these games, annotated by Renato Quintilliano and David Navara. Enjoy!

5/18/2021 – The German word "Zugzwang" describes the phenomenom that the rules of chess force you to make a move when it's your turn even if it would be better to do nothing. In chess, you simply cannot pass. "Zugzwang" is a typical endgame phenomenon that often decides the game. In the diagram position White can use "zugzwang" to force the opponent to self-destruct. How?

5/17/2021 – The Meltwater Champions Chess Tour delivers a world first for its next event: an elite-level bitcoin chess tournament. The star-studded FTX Crypto Cup starts on May 23 and offers a record $320,000 prize pot for an online event — $100,000 of that is a bonus paid in crypto by new sponsor FTX, the leading cryptocurrency exchange. Fans will be able to track the prize pot's value in real-time throughout the broadcast to see how it fluctuates.

5/17/2021 – The second edition of the MrDodgy Invitational was played on May 12-16 in the chess24 PlayZone. The event was a 16-player knockout, with each match consisting of 12 blitz games (5 minutes for the game, without increments). Top seed Anish Giri, who had won the first edition of the event, defeated Baadur Jobava in the final to get the first prize of $2,500 plus a picture of Dodgy on a horse.

5/17/2021 – The Fritztrainer thematic tournament starts today at 19:00 CEST (13:00 ET, 17:00 UTC) and will be hosted live on Twitch.tv by Daniel King and Arne Kaehler. The discount day, which starts Monday, 17 May, 18:00 CEST (12:00 ET, 16:00 UTC) offers a great opportunity to support your favourite Fritztrainer. But first and foremost, this tournament should be fun and it should offer us fine games with interesting openings to watch. We are looking forward to seeing the players in action: Rustam Kasimdzhanov, Mihail Marin, Merijn van Delft and Robert Ris.

5/17/2021 – For many chess players, chess problems just look bizarre: the pieces on the board often seem to be randomly placed and the positions appear to to be utterly removed from anything that can happen in a practical game. However, solving chess problems can be fun - if you know how to approach them. Vlaicu Crisan has some advice.