6/28/2024 – Faustino Oro was born in Argentina on 14 October 2013 and has a good chance of becoming the youngest International Master in the history of chess. He has already achieved two norms and will easily surpass the 2400 rating mark in the next FIDE world ranking, which will be published on 1 July. The Argentine therefore only needs a third norm to win the title. And that seems to be within his grasp at an IM tournament in Barcelona. | Photo: Infobae

6/28/2024 – When FIDE created the inaugural list of grandmasters, in 1950, there were 27 of them. Today, there are more than 1,850. “There are too many grandmasters,” said GM Nigel Short, FIDE director for chess development. “To call me grandmaster adds nothing. They are two a penny.” Dylan Loeb McClain writes about the situation in this interesting New York Times article.

6/28/2024 – 2024 Candidates Tournament: analyses by Giri, Gukesh, Firouzja, Praggnanandhaa and Vidit, plus video: Dorian Rogozenco shows the decisive moments of the tournament - "Special" on Gukesh: CBM authors show their favourite games of the youngest ever World Champion challenger, an exclusive collection of 24 annotated games - New trend from Toronto: Rustam Kasimdzhanov shows Caruana's 3...Nf6 in the Rossolimo Variation (video) - "The King is the goal!": Oliver Reeh presents 34 games with training exercises and four interactive videos - Semi-Slav Bluebaum Variation: Yago Santiago highlights the merits of 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 c6 5.Qc2!? - In the end it's the technique that counts: knight and pawn against pawn(s) in "Fundamental Endgame Knowledge" Part 10 and much more.

6/28/2024 – Fabiano Caruana and D Gukesh continue to share the lead at the Superbet Chess Classic in Bucharest, as the one decisive result of round 2 saw Alireza Firouzja beating Nodirbek Abdusattorov. Since Firouzja had lost to Caruana in the first round, this victory only allowed him to return to a fifty-percent score. Importantly, co-leader Caruana failed to make the most of a clearly better position in his game with white against Wesley So. | Photo: Lennart Ootes

6/28/2024 – Knights are the pieces with the most complicated moves. Beginners know this, but professionals are also often painfully reminded of this when they overlook forks. Jan Markos goes in search of the secret life of the knights...

6/27/2024 – In an in-depth interview, the founder and CEO of ChessBase India, Sagar Shah, talks about how chess is developing in India and what projects are keeping him busy. The interview was conducted by Stefan Liebig for the German chess magazine Schach 64 and tells us about Sagar's professional career, and his work with top Indian talents.

6/27/2024 – After nine rounds, three players shared first with 7.5/9 at the Teplice Open in the Czech Republic: Dutch Grandmaster Max Warmerdam, GM Tin Jingyao from Singapore and GM Alexander Donchenko from Germany. But Warmerdam had the best tie-break and won the tournament. | Photos: Tournament page

6/27/2024 – In his new Game of the Week show, Merijn van Delft looks at a strategically interesting and instructive game by Max Warmerdam, which helped the Dutch Grandmaster to win the Teplice Open, which ended a few days ago. | Merijn’s show is available on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here.

6/27/2024 – The Superbet Chess Classic saw two out of five games ending decisively on the first day of action. Fabiano Caruana and D Gukesh became the early co-leaders by beating Alireza Firouzja and Bogdan-Daniel Deac respectively. Both games featured considerable changes in evaluation, as the double-edged positions that appeared on the boards provoked mistakes by all involved parties. | Photo: Lennart Ootes

6/26/2024 – Magnus Carlsen's chess memory never ceases to amaze. At the Casablanca Chess Tournament in May 2024, Carlsen, Vishy Anand and Hikaru Nakamura were shown positions from historically important games and asked to guess the players and dates of the games. The twist: instead of pieces, the three top players saw only black and white checkers. But for Carlsen this seemed to be only a minor obstacle.

6/26/2024 – The 37th edition of the “Magistral Ciudad de León” will take place on June 28-30 at the city’s Auditorium. Jaime Satnos will attempt to defend his title against two living legends and a rising star: Vishy Anand, Veselin Topalov and Arjun Erigaisi. In 2023, Santos became the second Spaniard to win the event after beating Boris Gelfand in the final.

6/25/2024 – MegaBase 2024 is Chess History in action. Regularly updated every month, the Main Database currently offers 10.6 million games, many of them annotated. In the first part of his series our columnist dealt with the treatment of chess in the 21st Century in the MegaBase. In the second part of the series he took us down the memory lane with a world championship that deserves to be better known. In the third and concluding part of the series he shows how we can learn from the games of the past in the MegaBase.