12/2/2020 – Football star Diego Armando Maradona passed away last Wednesday at age 60. Regarded worldwide as one of the greatest players of all time, he was glorified in his home country, Argentina. After his retirement as a professional footballer, Maradona worked as a manager first in 1994-95 and then from 2011 until his death. In the meantime, among other activities, he was a talk show host — in September 2005, former world chess champion Anatoly Karpov was one of his guests. | Pictured: Lorenzo Insigne, Napoli’s forward, placing flowers at a section of the San Paolo Stadium that donned a picture of Maradona. | Photo: Alessandro Garofalo/LaPresse

12/1/2020 – In his "Weekly Show" IM Lawrence Trent takes a look at the final of the Skilling Open, in which Wesley So defeated Magnus Carlsen in a blitz-tiebreak. | Lawrence's show is available at 18:00 UTC (19:00 CET, 14:00 ET) on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here.

12/1/2020 – Wesley So stunned Magnus Carlsen on his 30th birthday to win the Skilling Open, the inaugural event of the Champions Chess Tour. Carlsen admitted that So was a deserved winner, as he showed great nerves to make the most of his chances in the blitz tiebreaker. It was not a great tournament for Carlsen — by his extremely high standards — and in the final he faced a tactically alert opponent, who was up to the task when the pressure was at its highest. | Photo: Lennart Ootes

12/1/2020 – This year we are launching our "Christmas Fritztrainer Calendar". For the next 24 days, you can open one of our Fritztrainer doors daily, and guess: Which Fritztrainer is this? If you send us the correct answer by email, you are participating in a raffle to win plenty of prizes, including our big Christmas surprise packages!

12/1/2020 – December 1st is the first day of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, bringing daytime temperatures in the low 80s (Fahrenheit) to Canberra, the capital city of Australia. FIDE Master and International Arbiter Shaun Press provides photos and a history of outdoor chess in Canberra, with additional text by WIM Alexey Root.

12/1/2020 – Pawn endings often require knowledge and precise calculation. And sometimes a (temporary) retreat is the best (and only) way to make progress.

11/30/2020 – The Skilling Open is the first stop of the 2020-21 Champions Chess Tour. With 16 participants, the event will be played on November 22-30. A single round robin tournament to be played from Sunday to Tuesday will decide who moves on to the knockout stage.The top eight will advance to a 6-day knockout. The action each day begins at 17:00 GMT (18:00 CET, 12:00 ET). Read the full report on Day 1 of the final | Photo: Lennart Ootes

11/30/2020 – Медный Всадник, the "Bronze Horseman" from St. Petersburg, convincingly won the Russian Team Championships 2020 in Sochi. The "Horsemen" won eight of their nine matches and finished three points ahead of their closest rivals. Top scorer of the team was Maxim Matlakov (pictured), European Champion 2017. FSM Moscow won the women's event. | Photo: Lennart Ootes (Archive)

11/30/2020 – Magnus Carlsen and Wesley So go into the last day of the Skilling Open with the score tied after trading wins with white in the first four games of the final match. It all comes down to the second 4-game mini-match, while another tied score will lead to a blitz tiebreaker. The deciding confrontation will be played on Carlsen’s 30th birthday. | Photo: Lennart Ootes

11/30/2020 – Our new database program, ChessBase 16 has, as you know, a blindingly fast search. If you ask the program whether, and how often, a particular position has occurred in a collection of eight million games, and which were the moves played in that position, with what success, then you get an answer in less than one second! How is this possible? The author of this search booster function is Jeroen van den Belt, and he explains how he implemented the new search booster.

11/29/2020 – Grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi is Russia’s number one player and the fourth highest-rated player in the world. National Master Mike Walder prepares a recipe inspired by an Instagram post and annotates Giri-Nepomniachtchi from the 2020 Candidates, a tournament where Nepomniachtchi is currently one of the co-leaders. WIM Alexey Root tells why Ian Nepomniachtchi is a Grandmaster Chef honoree, using four-letter words as headers. | Photo: Alina l’Ami

11/29/2020 – Magnus Carlsen and Wesley So moved on to the final of the Skilling Open by drawing their second semifinal mini-matches against Ian Nepomniachtchi and Hikaru Nakamura respectively. It was a tougher day at the office for the world champion, who had to come back from a loss in game 1 and find defensive resources in the remaining encounters to keep things under control. | Photo: Lennart Ootes / frchess.com