12/28/2010 – Every year in the week before Christmas the ChessBase staff and business partners gather together for a company dinner. This year there was a very special event – which will be shown to you in part two of this report. In part one we present our new office quarters and many of the people who run the company. Pictorial report by Nadja Wittmann.

12/28/2010 – The European Rapid championship took place in Warsaw, Poland, with a field of over 700 players, allowing the casual club player to meet some of the world elite, such as Ivanchuk, Shirov, and Judit Polgar heads-on in competition. Zoltan Almasi prevailed after a 6-way tie was decided in a blitz playoff. The European Blitz Championship saw Vachier-Lagrave take the laurels. Report and miniatures.

12/27/2010 – All the deepest plans or endgame technique are useless if you fall victim to a shot that leaves you in a lost position or you miss the window of opportunity to finish the game, a chance that may only appear once. The positions here are all from recent master and grandmaster practice, representing shots both played and missed. Try your hand at these Master Moves.

12/27/2010 – Even a simple looking pawn ending can turn out to be a hard nut to crack, and sometimes a single, tiny tempo is the margin between a win and a draw. In this example from the European Rapid Chess Championship Black (to move) is in possession of a trump card - the distant passed pawn. The only question is whether  to play it straight away with 40...b3 or whether it is cleverer to hold back with it. Over the board, Black was obliged to take a quick decision. Fortunately for you, you can spend a bit more time on the analysis. As always, you will find the analysis of our endgame expert Dr. Karsten Müller in ChessBase Magazine Online.

12/25/2010 – We wish all our readers and friends, all over the world, a Merry Christmas 2010, wherever they are and in whatever language they speak. The greetings are sent to you from snow-covered Hamburg, in the north of Europe frozen to a standstill, with thousands stranded at airports and train stations, trying desperately to get to their loved ones. Here is something to cheer them up.

12/25/2010 – The venue was magnificently decked up like a chess board across 91 thousand square feet, 1024 masters played simuls against a total of 20,480 players, and deafening applause broke out when the Guinness adjudicator finally announced that a new Guinness World Record had been set. The patron of the event was World Champion Vishy Anand, who was blown away by the scope of the event.

12/25/2010 – We still can't get over what has been for us the tournament of the year. Apart from the super-exciting chess there was so much to see and so many interesting people to meet, that there are bound to be a few retrospective articles to appear on our pages. We start with some interesting pictures that did not make it to our daily reports. Big pictorial review.

12/24/2010 – Santa Claus could not have given her a better present. After being pushed into an unexpected tie-break, young Hou Yifan pulled herself together and won the 4-game rapid match with a convincing 3-1 score. The hitherto youngest finalist in history is now the youngest world champion ever, breaking Maia Chiburdanidze's 32-year-old record. Here is the final report.

12/23/2010 – This year two famous study composers would have celebrated their centenaries: Mark Savelevich Liburkin (1910-1953) from Moscow and Shaya Kozlowski (1910-1943) from Łodz, (Poland). Both died prematurely – Kozlowsky in Łodz in the WWII holocaust. Now the endgame association ARVES has announced centenary theme tourneys in their memory. Yochanan Afek provides details.

12/23/2010 – What could have been one of the dreariest championships in recent history, with over 71% draws, will instead go down as one of the most exciting. Karjakin took sole lead in round ten, but then lost tragically in the last, and had to decide first with Nepomniachtchi in a rapid tiebreaker. It finally all came down to just eleven minutes. Here is the final report with a video of the Armageddon blitz.

12/23/2010 – It seemed like Hou Yifan's victory was in the cards. Her early blow in the second game taking a 1.5-0.5 lead seemed decisive, and though Lufei Ruan obtained a significant edge in the third game, it ended in a draw. In the last, Ruan needed a win at all costs to force a tiebreak, and Ms. Nerves of Steel did it again and pulled off the victory! Report with annotations by GM Elshan Moradiabadi.

12/21/2010 – This year's final is an all-Chinese affair, though that is all they have in common. Hou Yifan is the brilliant 16-year-old prodigy seeking to break a world record, while Lufei Ruan is the tireless fighter who survived five nerve-wracking tiebreaks. We asked Jeff Sonas, the statistician, the odds on making it through even as favorite, and have also received annotations by GM Elshan Moradiabadi.