3/11/2017 – This week's games are by Andrew Sainsbury who is in his early thirties and lives in Bolton in Greater Manchester. Aside from chess, he enjoys playing the guitar, practicing Kung Fu, and learning languages. One of the games he sent is a Modern Defense that transposes to an Accelerated Dragon, and brings very detailed analysis by Jon Speelman.

3/10/2017 – ChessBase 14 has introduced a brand new way of analyzing chess positions with the help of the latest feature called Assisted Analysis. In this article we will be acquainting you with all the intricacies of Assisted Analysis and also show you how Grzegorz Gajewski's task of finding novelties for Vishy Anand is greatly simplified!

3/10/2017 – Watching Garry Kasparov playing chess is a treat. A rare treat since the arguably best player of all times stopped playing tournament chess in 2005. On the ChessBase Master Class DVD about Garry Kasparov grandmasters such as Dorian Rogozenco, Mihail Marin and Karsten Müller take a look at the career of the 13th World Champion and analyse what made him play so well. Our reviewer Christian Höthe is happy to say: "Kasparov is back!"

3/10/2017 – The diagram position might seem confusing, but in fact White is just winning - once he finds the trick to maintain the hanging knight d5 in its central position. After that, not even ...fxe3 (activating the bishop h2!) can save Black anymore.

3/10/2017 – Dr. Chandramallika Basak is one of the leading researchers in the area of working memory and cognitive control, training strategies, cognitive and brain plasticity, aging, and biomarkers of complex skill learning (e.g., video games). She has now begun research on children and chess. Alexey Root attended Dr. Basak’s lecture “Cognitive Benefits of Learning to Play Chess and Other Strategy Games” and reports here.

3/9/2017 – Organized by Alexei Shirov together with the Riga Chess Federation, the Tal Memorial Rapid tournament was recently held in Jurmala, Latvia. The aim of the tournament was to pay tribute to the brightest representative of Latvian Chess ever, and players from all around the world came to enjoy this event. The tournament was won by Vladimir Onischuk, but the biggest surprise was the 6th place finish by veteran Evgeny Sveshnikov. Here is the illustrated report.

3/4/2017 – It really must be considered a Cinderella story, since by all means, Everaldo Matsuura was not even supposed to be in the final, let alone win it, yet by forceful contortions of fate, the friendly player from the state of Paraná stormed away with the event, winning his second Brazilian title after 26 years. Juliana Terao crushed the Women’s Championship with 8.5/9. Here is the large illustrated report with GM analysis.

3/3/2017 – We have some very interesting new functionality on our news page. On the right you see a list of "Live Tournaments" – these are events that are currently or were recently broadcast on Playchess. A single click takes you to a luxury broadcast page where you can follow the most important games, or replay all of them from the event, analysing them with engine assistance. But best of all: you can load deep realtime analysis and find out instantly what happened. All on different devices, without ever leaving the news page!

3/3/2017 – Playing 32...Rh6! in the diagram, Black wants to create fresh threats on the kingside. But this rook is going to do much more - at the end it will neutralize White's counterplay in the b-file! How this?...

3/3/2017 – The classical part of world women championship in Tehran, Iran, has concluded but the winner, similar to the last World Championship in New York, has yet to be determined by tiebreak. The two finalists, after shedding blood in rounds two and three, took a rest and agreed to a rather fast draw in the last round to go for a tiebreak. Report, tiebreak preview, and analysis by GM Elshan Moradiabadi.

3/3/2017 – One of the most important days in years for computer consumers was the launch yesterday of AMD’s newest microprocessor, the R7 Ryzen. For a decade, AMD had been out of the race in high-end desktop CPUs, but the release of the new architecture has shown it is not only back, but at a far more affordable price, and what is more: the best deal around for chess analysis.

3/2/2017 – Hailing from sunny Brazil, and living in Georgia, GM Alexandr Fier is a fixture on the circuit of opens throughout Europe and South America. The Brazilian player is now playing in the 9th Batavian Tournament, a GM event held in a café in Amsterdam, which he describes as the friendliest event he has known. Enjoy his midway report with photos and analysis.