11/19/2020 – When you start playing chess, when you are still a beginner, it is useful to know a few openings tricks – move sequences that lead your opponent astray and give you a quick win. It is equally important to know such traps so that your opponent cannot use them on you. We start you on a course that is useful and at the same time quite entertaining. Take a little time to learn dozens of traps you can use in your club tournaments.

11/10/2020 – The Candidates 2007 took place in "City Chess" in Elista, Kalmykia, a large residential complex devoted to chess and chess competitions. It was built by the then President of the country, and then President of FIDE Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who invited Frederic Friedel to attend the tournament. After the event was over Ilyumzhinov showed him around the city. Pictorial impressions.

11/8/2020 – Boris Grebenshchikov is a cult figure in the Russian rock scene, revered by millions (including a super-GM friend from Saint Petersburg). Telo Tulku Rinpoche is a Philadelphia-born Buddhist Lama, the highest religious authority in Kalmykia. On the final day of the FIDE Candidates Finals 2007 the former gave a concert and the latter a gala dinner. Big pictorial report.

11/7/2020 – The Candidates 2007 took place in "City Chess" in Elista, Kalmykia. This is a neighborhood-size complex consisting of a central, four-story domed City Chess Hall surrounded by an Olympic-style village of Californian-Mediterranean Revival Style architecture, all devoted to chess competition. Just getting there – in an ancient Yakovlev Yak-40 – was an adventure, as was experiencing the city and the FIDE center located there.

11/6/2020 – Today, Friday, November 6, at 2:30 p.m. (in Europe) there will be another Blitz Challenge on Playchess. The player to beat is 18-year-old Iniyan Panneerselvam, who recently won the World Open, and played a 72-hour online Blitz Marathon to raise funds for the COVID crisis. The Playchess challenge games will be commented by host IM Sagar Shah, who will also be analyzing them with Iniyan afterwards. You too can play against him too, or simply watch and learn.

11/5/2020 – Back in 2007 Frederic Friedel was invited by FIDE to attend the Candidates Matches in Elista. You can google "Candidates Elista 2007" for full details of the event, or use Mega Database to find all the games. We do not intend to retrace the course of the event, but instead tell you about the adventure of travelling to Kalmykia and attending it personally. We start with the first leg of the journey.

10/9/2020 – Modifying the existing rules for chess to make it more dynamic or decisive, needs years of experience and a large numbers of games if we are to assess the quality and appeal of any new variant. The company DeepMind has used their AI technology to evaluate nine variants proposed by former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik in a much shorter period of time. Here are their findings for "Torpedo Chess", where pawns can move two squares forward from anywhere.

9/30/2020 – Modifying the existing rules for chess to make it more dynamic or decisive, is a non-trivial task: you need years of experience and large numbers of people playing new versions in order to assess the quality and appeal of any new variant. Former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik has proposed new variants, and DeepMind has used their AI technology to evaluate them in a much shorter period of time. Here are their findings for No-castling, Pawn one square and Stalemate=win chess.

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.