Meet the Fritztrainer - Merijn van Delft

1/7/2021 – Hundreds of different Fritztrainers have been teaching us chess on ChessBase for more than a decade. Maybe you sometimes wonder what else the authors of these Fritztrainers do? "Meet the Fritztrainer" takes a look behind the scenes, telling us more about the private life of your favourite chess trainer. We already had the pleasure to talk to GM Chris Ward, and in this second episode we turn our attention to IM Merijn van Delft. The Dutch IM talks a bit about his weekly show "Game of the week", his first Fritztrainer and what "chess" means to him. | Photos: Merijn van Delft

FIDE Women's Grand Prix Gibraltar rescheduled

1/7/2021 – Originally, the fourth and final tournament of the Women's Grand Prix 2019 was scheduled to take place in Gibraltar, from January 17th to January 29th. But due to the Corona pandemic and high infection rates in Gibraltar, FIDE decided to postpone the tournament. Press release...

Game of the Week: Daniil Dubov vs Maxime Vachier-Lagrave

1/6/2021 – This week Merijn van Delft takes another look at the Airthings Masters. He focuses on the match between Daniil Dubov and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, an interesting clash of styles and a tense battle with a lot of decisive games. | Merijn's show is available at 16.00 UTC (17:00 CET, 12:00 EDT) and on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here. | Photo: Lennart Ootes

Michael Adams wins British Online Championship

1/6/2021 – Over the turn of the year, the British Chess Federations organised their annual championship as an online tournament. Michael Adams, with a rating of 2716 currently Britain's number 1, was clear favourite. Adams indeed won the title, but only after a close play-off against IM Ameet Ghasi. | Photo: ECF

Queens of Chess: "Beth Harmon" and Judit Polgar have a little chat

1/6/2021 – At the end of the year, Netflix organised a little video chat between Anya Taylor-Joy, who played Beth Harmon, the fictional world's best player, in the Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit", and the real-life best women player in history: Judit Polgar. An interesting talk!

Kovalenko, Pantsulaia and Martirosyan win Winter of Washington Online Tournament

1/6/2021 – The Pacific Northwest Chess Center (PNWCC) wants to make chess more popular and wants to give chess players opportunities to play and to improve. Before corona the PNWCC was organising a lot of live events, during the pandemic the Chess Center organises attractive and strong online tournaments. At the end of last year, the Winter of Washington tournament was played, a nine-round online tournament. Igor Kovalenko, Levan Pantsulaia and Haik Martirosyan shared first with 7.0/9 each.

The Weekly Show: Airthings Masters Final

1/6/2021 – In his "Weekly Show" IM Lawrence Trent will revisit Radjabov’s fantastic victory over Levon Aronian in the Airthings Masters final. The focus will be on their fantastic game 1 of the final day, which ended in a draw but could have easily been a win for either player! | Lawrence's show is available at 17:00 UTC (18:00 CET, 12:00 ET) on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here.

Beating the champ, ending his run!

1/5/2021 – For two years now, "The Analysis" has been a permanent column in the ChessBase Magazine. The editors choose "the best" of the usually more than 30 annotated games in an issue. In the current issue CBM #199 it is very a special game: in Duda-Carlsen (Norway Chess 2020) the World Champion's series of 125 classical tournament games without defeat came to an end. The winner, our author Jan-Krzysztof Duda, comments. Take a look and join in the victory!
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Let's talk about chess... with Venkat Saravanan (Part II)

1/5/2021 – In his first podcast of 2021 Eric van Reem continues his talk with the renowned trainer and writer IM Venkatchalam Saravanan from India. In part I of the podcast they talked about the chess year 2020, the online chess boom in India, the upcoming Anand biopic, and the Candidates Tournament. In part II they talk about chess books. | Photo: Amruta Mokal

Opening up

1/5/2021 – Endings with opposite coloured bishops have drawish tendencies. And often positional factors are more important than material, particularly so when building a fortress is the order of the day: White to play and draw!

Meltwater becomes title partner of Champions Chess Tour

1/5/2021 – Meltwater, a leading global provider of media intelligence and social analytics solutions, will be the title partner for Play Magnus Group’s Champions Chess Tour. With this agreement, Meltwater also becomes a partner for World Champion Magnus Carlsen. Press release...

Donchenko wins Cracovia Open 2020

1/4/2021 – Alexander Donchenko was the favourite in the A-Open of the Cracovia Chess Festival, which despite Corona was played over the board. With a win in the final round, the German Grandmaster won the tournament convincingly with 8.0/9. | Photo: Tournament website

Christmas Puzzles: solutions (2)

1/4/2021 – In our December 31 puzzle page we showed you problems ranging from mate in one to mate in 203 – expecting this record from decades ago to have been broken. And indeed it was: there is now a direct mate problem in which you have to play 226 accurate moves to mate the opponent (i.e. it is dual-free). In our second solutions page we also provide the answer to the ominous train problem, which has eluded some of the brightest minds in the world.

Aronian vs. MVL: A fascinating endgame

1/4/2021 – The Airthings Masters brought a lot of interesting endgames. One such endgame occurred in the decisive game of the semifinal match between Levon Aronian and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave: Aronian had bishop and knight and tried to convert an extra pawn against the pair of bishops. After inaccuracies from both sides Aronian finally won and advanced to the final. Zoran Petronijevic had a close look.

Teimour Radjabov beats Levon Aronian, wins Airthings Masters

1/4/2021 – Teimour Radjabov secured first place in the Airthings Masters after scoring two points in three games against Levon Aronian, as he had already won the first mini-match on Saturday. Meanwhile, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave defeated Daniil Dubov in a lively match for third place. | Photo: Shamkir Chess

Backwards and forwards

1/3/2021 – Star columnist Jon Speelman recaps what he describes as an “unpr******ted” year, noting that the u-word is “a screen behind the comforting foliage of which gormless politicians have hidden”. Speelman then analyses remarkable wins by Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Daniil Dubov, Hikaru Nakamura and Magnus Carlsen. | Photos: Niki Riga / Lennart Ootes

Airthings Masters Finals - Live!

1/3/2021 – The year 2020 ends with a strong online tournament: the Airthings Masters. Teimour Radjabov won the first set of the finals, while Daniil Dubov and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave drew their first four-game encounter in the match for third place. The action kicks off at 15:00 CET, 9:00 ET. Follow the games live with commentary. Read the full report on day 1 of the finals. | Photos: Official site

Airthings Masters Finals: Radjabov wins first set

1/3/2021 – The first day of the Airthings Masters finals was played on Saturday. Teimour Radjabov won the last of the four games against Levon Aronian to bag the first ‘set’. In the match for third place, everything is still tied, as Daniil Dubov and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave drew their first four-game encounter. | Photo: FIDE

Understanding before Moving 8: Divided in two - Part 2

1/3/2021 – Herman Grooten is an International Master, a renowned trainer and the author of several highly acclaimed books about chess training and chess strategy. In the eighth part of his ChessBase show "Understanding before Moving" Herman shows how important the harmony between pieces is. | Photo: Hans Hoornstra

Christmas puzzles: solutions

1/2/2021 – From Christmas Day, December 25th 2020, until New Year 2021, we published four installments of chess puzzles for you to solve. They were mostly computer resistant, which meant you couldn't simply start and engine to work them out. Today we bring you the solutions of the first three puzzle pages, with the fourth to follow soon. How many did you solve?

Yu Yangyi and Tan Zhongyi are the 2020 Chinese champions

1/2/2021 – The Chinese Championships took place in the city of Xinghua. In the open section, Yu Yangyi, Lu Shanglei and Wei Yi all collected 8 points after 11 rounds. Yu Yangyi, however, had the best tiebreak score. Fourth place went to the Women's World Champion Ju Wenjun, whose predecessor in the post of World Champion, Tan Zhongyi, won the women’s tournament. | Photo: Nadja Wittmann

Airthings Masters SF: Well-deserved finalists

1/2/2021 – Levon Aronian and Teimour Radjabov obtained convincing victories to reach the finals of the Airthings Masters, to be played on Saturday and Sunday starting at 15:00 CET. Aronian got the better of Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, while Radjabov eliminated Daniil Dubov, who came from knocking out world champion Magnus Carlsen. | Photo: Lennart Ootes / Grand Chess Tour

Damion Coppedge: Prison, Poetry, Buddhism and Chess

1/1/2021 – When Damion Coppedge was in prison for manslaughter, he played chess, wrote poetry, and practiced Buddhism. From prison, he sent $25 to Ugandan chess player Phiona Mutesi, which enabled her coach to open Mutesi’s first bank account. Free since 2019, Coppedge creates videos about chess, the game that he loves.

Not all rook endings are drawn

1/1/2021 – In the quarterfinal of the Airthings Masters Magnus Carlsen was defeated by Daniil Dubov after losing two spectacular games, in which Carlsen missed good chances. In another game of the match Carlsen had good chances in a rook ending with an extra pawn. But could he have won? Zoran Petronijevic and Karsten Müller took a close look!