15th European Women's Championship starts

7/7/2014 – The 15th European Individual Women’s Chess Championship has just started, and is being held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria from July 5-18. 116 top female competitors in Europe will be competing over eleven rounds to determine the title. The top seeds are Nana Dzagnidze (2541), Mariya Muychuk (2521), Natalia Pogonina (2508), Valentina Gunina (2501) and more. Get up to speed in this opening report.

Ni Hua wins XXII Montcada Open

7/6/2014 – 17 grandmasters and players from nearly 20 countries participated in this Spanish open, which was won by the Chinese GM. If you wonder why so many strong players were there, in spite of the meagre first prize of €1,200 – there are a number of reasons, not the least of which is a series of four or five events that take place in the same local and temporal vicinity. Big pictorial report.

Ding Liren edges Bu Xiangzhi to top Hainan

7/6/2014 – Bu Xiangzhi's draw against Yu Yangyi, who was trying to stop the bleeding from his three losses in a row, guaranteed him a share of first place. Ding Liren, the only player that could catch him, took advantage of this opportunity and won a nice game with Black, edging Bu Xiangzhi in tiebreaks. We bring you a final round report on an interesting event and a fierce Chinese Olympic team.

Profile of a prodigy: Kayden Troff

7/5/2014 – Last May, and a few weeks after his 16th birthday, Kayden Troff became the youngest GM in the Americas and the second youngest grandmaster in the world. He is also the top ranked player U16 in the Americas and recently won the US Junior Championship a full 1.5 points ahead of his rivals. As part of the rising generation of American players, here is a profile by James Satrapa.

Chess Art Festival in Mayfair

7/5/2014 – A professional jazz singer who has made her name as a chess artist, Nette Robinson, was the centre of a special chess festival staged by Purling London, a company that sells unique hand-painted chess sets. There was a blitz tournament, a simultaneous exhibition and an unusual Chess Basque Championship, in which the opponents have to play two simultaneous games.

3rd HMC Calder Cup gets creative

7/4/2014 – The HMC Calder Cup celebrated its third edition, with a series of entertaining activities and events. Among them was a grandmaster tournament as befits it, but there was also a small very strong rapid round-robin with Anish Giri and Rustam Kasimdzhanov, a girl-guy team match, and even a sort of chessboxing competition in which the boxing was replaced by table tennis!

Chinese lead in Hainan

7/4/2014 – With only one round to go in the Hainan Daizhou super-tournament it is almost a given that a Chinese player will take the tournament. Bu Xiangzhi is half a point ahead of Ding Liren while the two foreign players, Ponomariov and Naiditsch, trail the leader by a full point. We bring you a report with some of the highlights of the last three rounds with some impressive chess.

Lopota GP: a fond farewell

7/3/2014 – The aftermath of a large tournament brings the necessary formalities such as the prize giving, and speeches, yet the Lopota Women's Grand Prix was a cozy affair held in a perfect mix of officialdom, and good cheer. Set in a beautiful backdrop with good wine, toasting, food, and more toasting, Alina L'Ami shares this final pictorial. One picture does require help from our readers.

Opening Encyclopaedia 2014: the ultimate reference

7/2/2014 – For years, no player could do without an opening encyclopedia, to provide quick and comprehensive answers on any and every opening line. Welcome to the Opening Encyclopedia 2014. In it you will find a massive 4.9 million game database, more commented games than Mega Database, thousands of surveys and hundred of articles. It may have no equal in terms of bang for the buck.

Nine-year-old rips through GMs!

7/2/2014 – When a 2600 GM loses a game to a player 550 points lower on the rating scale, this will cause us to take note. But if the winner is just nine years old, then surprise turns to stunned shock – especially if the win did not come through a fluke blunder by the GM, but was a gritty, square-by-square grind-down in which the youthful master prevailed. Akshat Chandra has carefully annotated the game.

Lopota Final: Fitting Finish

7/2/2014 – The tournament finished with a mixture of ferocious chess in some games and very subdued battles in others. Ju Wenjun finished tied for second with Danielian, who drew Hou Yifan in the last round, after her ultra-risky approach to chess backfired badly on her. Khotenashvili won an important moral victory by defeating Humpy. At the end of the day, Hou Yifan won by two full points.

Classical, Rapid, Blitz: FIDE's new rating lists

7/1/2014 – It's the first of the month - time for FIDE to publish the current ratings. The classical ratings saw a few shifts here and there, but everyone was waiting for the new FIDE Rapid and Blitz lists after the World Championships. At the top of the Rapid list is Caruana with 2858, followed by Carlsen with 2855, while the Norwegian is no.1 in Blitz with a huge 2948 rating.

Film project in Tromsø: Chess Brains

7/1/2014 – There is something mythical and mysterious about the game of chess, and the world's top players. It feels like they know something the rest of us barely recognize. They have a mind capacity that far exceeds our own. Do they know something about life that we don't? These are the questions that will be posed to some of the world's top GMs in a film project that you can support.

9th Edmonton: Ivanchuk wins with 8.0/9

7/1/2014 – The Edmonton International tournament was the highlight of the Edmonton chess festival, and brought a myriad of international players to face off against Canada's best. The two stars were Ivanchuk and So, and they played a private race to see who outdid whom. By the midway point So had the edge, and it seemed as if the show was his, but Ivanchuk showed he was a force to reckon with.

Lopota 10: Queenside Pawns!

7/1/2014 – In today's three decisive games, the queenside pawns were somehow the star of the battle. In Ju Wenjun-Muzychuk the Chinese player used her pair of bishops and active rook to wreck her opponents pawns, meanwhile Danielian and Humpy created passed pawns on that side to vanquish Zhao Xue and Muminova respectively. Hou Yifan's draw clinches the tournament, but second place is still open.

Simuls and Exhibitions in the Hawaii of China

7/1/2014 – Arkadij Naiditsch struck an important blow to Bu Xiangzhi by beating him in the fourth round of the 5th Hainan Danzhou tournament and took the lead for himself. However Bu Xiangzhi recovered immediately and won his fifth game to tie with the German up top. Yu Yangyi scored two in a row to also join them. Meanwhile, during the free day, it was the local players that won.

Hawaii: the chess vacation of a lifetime

6/30/2014 – If you look down at your feet you are probably looking in the general direction of Hawaii. The beautiful Pacific island group will be the host of an Inaugural Chess Festival in March 2015 – a weeklong series of world-class chess events that will bring chess enthusiasts from all over the world to the Hawaiian island of Oahu. You may be interested to attend this unique chess event.

8.5 out of 10 with the King's Gambit

6/30/2014 – That's the personal record of Simon Williams in recent years. No wonder, that the English GM fell in love with this unique, old and creative opening. On his popular and critically acclaimed DVDs about the King's Gambit he invites the reader to (re)discover this most romantic of all chess openings and to play successful attacking chess!

Kayden Troff is US Junior champion

6/30/2014 – The 2014 U.S. Junior Closed Championship has been decisive in its theme, and leaders rose and fell with hearbreaking collapses and heartwarming finishes. Victories were claimed on four of five boards in every one of the tournament’s last five rounds, and in fact there were only twelve draws out of 45 games, for almost 75% decisive games. Talk about bloodthirsty.

Lopota 09: Close race for second

6/30/2014 – The tournament is interesting again as Ju Wenjun leads the charge by half a point over Danielian and Dzagnidze, the former beat Humpy thanks to a time-trouble blunder and the latter fell to Stefanova in a complex game. Meanwhile, World Champion Hou Yifan keeps racking up rating points as she demolished Muzychuk in less than 30 moves. Her performance: 2875.

Azlan Iqbal: Introducing ‘Chess Constructs’

6/29/2014 – People love brilliancies from chess history – and artistic chess problems. But there is a big gap between the two. Positions from games demonstrate the natural beauty of actual play, while chess problems are highly technical, with little practical relevance. The author of this interesting article suggest an intermediate form, one you can try your hand at – and win a prize in the process.

Free day in Lopota

6/29/2014 – Traditionally in top-level tournaments one or even two days are given for the players to rest. How to use these rest days has been a question in grandmasters' minds for time immemorial. With two rest days in the Lopota Grand Prix the players had time to explore some of the local culture and enjoy some breathtaking sights. Follow Alina l'Ami's beautiful pictorial report.

Kavalek: Carlsen's Trifecta and Tal's Magic

6/28/2014 – Magnus Carlsen's World title wins in classical, rapid and blitz reminds Huffington Post columnist Lubomir Kavalek of a horse and an athlete: the thoroughbred Secretariat and the long-distance runner Emil Zátopek, both triple crown winners in their own fields. Carlsen's style also reminds Kavalek of Mikhail Tal (who died today 22 years ago). Enjoy three wonderfully annotated games.

9th Edmonton brings Ivanchuk and So

6/28/2014 – The 9th Edmonton chess festival, held in Edmonton, Canada, is one of the most important events in the Canuck chess calendar, allowing players to fight for norms often against elite opposition. Although hardly homogeneous in its lineup, the eclectic selection of players does mean chess fans will see the widest possible variety of games, while Ivanchuk and So give master classes.