8/22/2019 – Ding Liren joined the leaders Viswanathan Anand and Fabiano Caruana at the top of the table with 3 points after a round of hard fought battles in almost all games at the Sinquefield Cup. Nemponiachtchi was the other winner of the round after his opponent Hikaru Nakamura played unevenly to lose a game where he didn't seem to be in his best of form. Anand, Caruana and So demonstrated very sharp opening preparations which made this round the most memorable of the tournament so far. IM VENKATACHALAM SARAVANAN reports from the venue. | Photo: Crystal Fuller / Grand Chess Tour

8/22/2019 – If you have ever had a chess engine analysing deeply on your notebook, you'll notice you soon hear the cooling fan rushing, the battery is sucked empty as your push the limits of the hardware. The ChessBase Engine Cloud solves this problem: Current chess engines, installed on high-performance hardware — your wish is their command! Use the cloud's computing power without burdening your notebook or upgrading to expensive hardware. Have top-notch processing power already. Then you can become a supplier! The Engine Cloud is also a marketplace where you can rent engines out to others.

8/22/2019 – The Superfinals of the 72nd Russian Championship and the 69th Russian Women's Championship concluded in Izhevsk. In the final round Evgeny Tomashevsky won while Vitiugov could only draw giving the 32-year-old from Saratov his second Russian Championship title. Meanwhile, in the Women's, Natalija Pogonina and Olga Girya went all the way to an Armageddon blitz game play-off to decide the championship in favour of Girya. Games and commentary from 9:00 UTC (11:00 CEST, 5:00 AM EDT). | Photo: Eteri Kublashvili

8/22/2019 – The penultimate round of the Russian Championships left two players sharing the lead in the open section, as Nikita Vitiugov and Evgeny Tomashevsky drew their games while former co-leader Ernesto Inarkiev lost against Vladislav Artemiev. In the women's category, Natalija Pogonina got a crucial victory over Valentina Gunina and is now half a point behind sole leader Olga Girya. The final round will be played on Thursday, two hours earlier than usual. | Photo: Eteri Kublashvili

8/21/2019 – IM Merijn van Delft is live this week and will examine Maxime Vachier-Lagrave's win over Richard Rapport from the St. Louis Rapid tournament. The show is free to watch, and available on-demand for ChessBase Premium account holders (but FREE for a limited time!). To chat, please visit videos.chessbase.com/live or login via Playchess for Windows. Merijn is on-demand this week starting at 18:00 UTC (20:00 CEST / 2 PM EDT).

8/21/2019 – The spell of draws was finally broken when Levon Aronian blundered under time pressure handing Fabiano Caruana a well-deserved victory in the only decisive game of the fourth round. All other games ended in draws, as Vishy Anand messed up a complicated calculation to miss a certain win while Magnus Carlsen overlooked another opportunity to grind his opponent down. IM VENKATACHALAM SARAVANAN reports from the venue. | Photo: Lennart Ootes / Grand Chess Tour

8/21/2019 – The ninth round of the Russian Championships were played on Tuesday at the International Friendship Center in Izhevsk. The only winner of the day in the Open, Ernesto Inarkiev, joined Evgeny Tomashevsky and Nikita Vitiugov in the lead. In the Women's, Aleksandra Goryachkina took down runaway leader Olga Girya and now shares second place with Natalija Pogonina, Valentina Gunina and Alina Kashlinskaya, a point behind the top scorer. | Photo: Eteri Kublashvili

8/21/2019 – In Alexey Root’s first article about FM and WGM Jennifer Yu’s ½ of 9 score in the U.S. Junior Championship, Root speculated about whether research on “stereotype threat” and on the difficulty of second-half “comebacks” could apply to Yu’s performance, which was around 2½ points less than her expected score. In this first follow-up article, WIM ALEXEY ROOT explores stereotype threat in chess. | Pictured: (clockwise from left) Annie Wang, Sarah Chiang, Jennifer Yu | Photos: USChessChamps.com

8/20/2019 – Lawrence is LIVE this week with a look at fantastic individual performances from the Continental Open in Massachusetts, USA. Live and free for a limited time, or forever on-demand with a ChessBase Basic Account. You can register a free 90-day account to watch.

8/20/2019 – For the second day in succession, it was six draws in Saint Louis at the Sinquefield Cup. That enabled Vishy Anand to continue to lead as the only winner from the first round. The story of the day was the players with white pieces getting good advantages only to fritter them away in a spate of carelessness. IM VENKATACHALAM SARAVANAN reports about all action from the venue. | Photo: Lennart Ootes / Grand Chess Tour

8/20/2019 – If only a few pawns remain on the board the likelihood of a draw increases. Knight endgames are the closest pure pawn endings in terms of the stronger side having winning chances, but as the pawn count shrinks, so does the probability of a decisive outcome.

8/20/2019 – Some people keep a Komodo dragon in their yard, and some keep it in their living room, safely inside their computer! In this interview with Grandmaster Larry Kaufman, one of the creators of Komodo, the World Chess Software Champion, we gain new insight into the latest release of the popular chess program. Komodo has gained strength both in the standard version, but particularly in the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), making the engine a valuable research tool for correspondence games, and openings.