9/21/2020 – Last week we gave you a series of chess problems which cannot be solved by computers, taken from a book called "Outrageous Chess" by Burt Hochberg. Were you able to find the out-of-the-box answers? And do you like this kind of problem? In any case, today we reveal the correct solutions and explain the ideas behind the problems.

9/14/2020 – Publishing chess problems on this news site has a long tradition: especially at Christmas time we publish a set of entertaining puzzles for our readers to solve. But over the years – two decades actually – it became progressively more difficult to find problems that chess engines could not solve in seconds. It became pointless to issue a challenge and provide prizes. So we have taken to giving you problems which cannot be solved by computers. Here are some samples from a collection by Burt Hochberg.

9/8/2020 – In the prestigious news magazine Der SPIEGEL, edition 49/1982, we found the following chess problem, which a reader had solved on his chess computer. It was a 7-mover and the computer required more than 48 days to solve it. In an article at the time Frederic Friedel tried to explain not why it took so long, but how it could manage to process theoretically three trillion positions so quickly! In the meantime things have changed and regular chess engines have become much, much faster. You can find out how much faster yourself.

8/23/2020 – In a recent article mathematician Christian Hesse described the concept of the "winchain" – is there a player you have beaten, who has beaten someone, who has beaten someone, who beat a World Champion? It is astonishing how close you can get – like a 2144 player, Fabian Brinkmann, being just three steps away from Magnus Carlsen. Fabian has written a nice little ChessBase app which will help you search for your winchains.

8/18/2020 – In 1983 rookie chess journalist Frederic Friedel wrote an article for a German magazine, defining and celebrating "Super Grandmasters" – players who were rated 2600 or higher. There were 13 such players, and they were led by World Champion Anatoly Karpov, with a young upstart named Garry Kasparov hard at his heels. The top female player in the world, Pia Cramling, was rated 2355. Today things have changed somewhat – to put it mildly.

8/13/2020 – How far away are you from the World Champion, in terms of handshakes, we asked our readers? At least one traced his handshake route all the way back to Philidor. Now we have a new challenge: have you beaten someone who has beaten someone who has beaten a World Champion? Prof. Christian Hesse describes the idea. You are invited to participate.

7/26/2020 – How far away are you from the World Champion, in terms of handshakes? Have you shaken hands with someone who has shaken hands with him? How far from Boris Spassky? Capablanca? Morphy? We asked about this a couple of weeks ago, and it led to some fascinating historical research, all the way back to European experts/authors who lived in the 1500s and 1600s. And we have a winner!

7/24/2020 – 1933, Moscow. Michael Botvinnik had just won the USSR Chess Championship. A match was arranged between him and one of the top players at the time, Czechoslovakian Champion Salomon Flohr. The 12-game match was drawn, after Flohr took an early lead. In one of his games he showed the chess world how to force a win in the 2B vs 2N endgame. But did he really, or did Botvinnik simply misplay it? Can you help endgame specialist GM Karsten Müller answer this question?

7/22/2020 – That's what the chess club in Marburg, Germany, intended when they submitted a video clip for the city initiative to combat the covid pandemic. The three-minute clip was made by quantum physicist and string theorist Vera Spillner, who is a member of the club. It gives chess fans an insight into the game and into club life during Corona, with a clever move, checkmate, included. Vera's video is the first of a series.

7/17/2020 – His full name is Tanitoluwa Emmanuel Adewumi, Tani for short, and he was a Nigerian refugee living in a homeless shelter in Manhattan, USA. There Tani discovered his affinity for chess, and at the age of nine his goal is to become the world’s youngest grandmaster – something the Covid pandemic is making it very difficult to achieve. Watch this inspiring CBS report.

7/17/2020 – Last Monday one of our favourite chess prodigies Nihal Sarin celebrated his 16th birthday – not by enjoying a nice evening with family and friends. Nihal is no ordinary youngster! He is a full GM and rated 2620! On his birthday Nihal decided to spend roughly around an hour and a half with ChessBase India solving sixteen positions that IM Sagar Shah had handpicked for him! You can watch him doing it, and join him in his efforts. There is a lot to learn.

7/5/2020 – Looking back: in 1983 Frederic Friedel was in Budapest for the third Microcomputer World Chess Championship. There he made first acquaintance with the Polgar family, but also met the East German chess programming team. His description of this memorable encounter tells us what things were like in the fading years of Eastern European communism.

7/1/2020 – Did you miss it? The Summer Nostos Festival, an international, multidimensional festival that gives us a week bursting with art, conversation, ideas, music, dance, performances, entertainment, and sports, for visitors of all ages, last Saturday streamed a preview of next year's edition. Watch it all, or just the in-depth discussion with Garry Kasparov and Judit Polgar.

6/24/2020 – How far away are you from the World Champion, in terms of handshakes? Have you shaken hands with someone who has shaken hands with him? How far from Boris Spassky? Capablanca? Morphy? Here's this week's challenge: try to find the shortest handshake chain from you to the most famous chess players you can think of. There's a prize for the most impressive submission.

6/12/2020 – Take a look at this position. Can White (on the move) win? And if so what must he play? The position looks deceptively simple, but if you are able to solve it in your head, congratulations! Today's challenge is mainly to humans, and we bring you simple-looking positions from which there is a lot to learn. Have fun.

5/24/2020 – Back in the 1980s some program authors tried to avoid the problems of the horizon effect by following suspicious lines a few half moves deeper. It became ever more difficult to use the horizon trap on them. The authors were not always forthcoming about their progress, so Frederic Friedel devised a number of test positions to find out more and to find how individual programs worked.

5/12/2020 – Can computers handle perpetual check? Could they do so ten years ago. And more relevantly: can humans? Even those with super-GM titles? Well, a 2351 player was able to do it better than his brother, who was rated 400 points higher. We have told the story before, but since our readers spent the weekend working on the Djaja problem, it may be of interest to remember how Aronian, Navara, Gashimov, Mamedyarov and Kasparov fared.

5/11/2020 – He was one of the more interesting personalities in and around chess – but not just there. "Iepe the Joker" was a Dutch artist, entrepreneur, innovator and storyteller. For us his most relevant enterprises was chess boxing, which he initiated and popularized in a way nobody foresaw. On Sunday he was found dead in his bed – how and why we do not yet know. Frederic Friedel has written a obituary with description of his interactions with a dear friend.