6/27/2019 – Four players opened the Croatian leg of the Grand Chess Tour with a win. Most eyes were on World Champion Magnus Carlsen, who continued his astounding year with an inaugural win in Zagreb over Anish Giri. Carlsen's latest challenger, Fabiano Caruana, also won, after taking advantage of a blunder by Hikaru Nakamura, while Wesley So and Ian Nepomniachtchi got full points as well, with victories over Ding Liren and Vishy Anand. | Photo: Lennart Ootes / Grand Chess Tour

6/15/2019 – After a 14-year tournament hiatus, Grandmaster Patrick Wolff recently played several rated games at the Mechanics’ Institute Chess Club, where he had been serving as Interim Director until June 14. In an extensive interview he tells WIM Alexey Root about updating his best-selling book, being a second to then-World Championship challenger Vishy Anand, winning two U.S. Championships, and making chess more appealing to corporate sponsors. | Photos: Courtesy of Patrick Wolff

5/17/2019 – 22 years ago Garry Kasparov played an ill-fated match against Deep Blue. There were many interesting visitors at the event in New York, amongst them a young Women's Grandmaster who, in an interview, said: "I don't think it's my place to criticize a World Champion, but ...". She went on to give a frank opinion of Kasparov's strategy. Today Anjelina Belakovskaia, who is doing remarkable work for American chess (and finance), turns fifty. FREDERIC FRIEDEL looks back at his first encounter with her, and the early days of ChessBase Magazine.

3/27/2019 – The announcement came as a shock to the chess world: former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik, one of the all-time greats of chess, said he would no longer be participating in competitive chess. Journalists rushed to ask him about his motives, and one of the resulting pieces stood out: an interview in the Chennai-based New Sunday Express. We bring you excerpts (with kind permission) and narrative by Frederic Friedel on his first encounter with the super-talent.

2/27/2019 – Which are the commonest words in the English language, which are the most common girls' and boys' names? Today it is possible to calculate these things fairly easily, but it becomes really useful if you are able to present the results in a comprehensible way. Like with dynamic graphs and bubbling. This was done very nicely for historical chess strength in 2016 by Abacaba, a site that makes videos about data and math. Now a YouTube channel called TheRanker has published a 10-minute video visualisation tracking official FIDE ratings from 2000 to the present. It is informative, interesting and even relaxing to watch.

2/19/2019 – For almost three decades Vladimir Kramnik has been one of the world's best players, and from 2000 to 2007 he was World Champion, the 14th in the history of chess. Kramnik has inspired countless players, from amateurs to grandmasters, and the new ChessBase Masterclass reviews the career of this outstanding player, improves your game and invites you to enjoy chess with Vladimir Kramnik.

2/8/2019 – The 53rd Annual Greater New York Scholastic Team and Individual Chess Championships and a similar event in Chicago were held recently, and the Greater Mid-Atlantic Scholastic Championships is coming up in a just over a week. All are in cooperation with the Kasparov Chess Foundation. | Pictured: (Seated) Michael Khodarkovsky and Garry Kasparov (standing) scholastic coach Michael Ellenbogen and New York scholastic players | Photo: Kasparov Chess Foundation

2/5/2019 – The recent World Championship in London was closely followed by Europe's largest (and most influential) news portal. Der Spiegel had live coverage and game commentary. They also posted a three-part series on the history of chess programming, authored by Frederic Friedel, emeritus editor of this news page. In the early 1980s Frederic was instrumental to bringing computer chess to the attention of the German public, and in 1987 he co-founded ChessBase. Here is part one of his series.

2/2/2019 – The story of Tal can never be finished and his fans always want more. Only this series has to end for now. In the concluding installment here our columnist offers his final observations on Team Tal, the last testament of Valentin Kirillov. | Photo: chesspro.ru

1/31/2019 – AlphaZero became a worldwide sensation when it defeated the world's strongest chess engine in a long match just hours after being fed the rules of the game. At the time, Garry Kasparov said that it had shaken chess to its roots. In the opinion of Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan, the authors of the book 'Game Changer: AlphaZero's Groundbreaking Chess Strategies and the Promise of AI' this all-new silicon monster developed by DeepMind has helped us discover that there is lots of fresh potential in chess. ADITYA PAI spoke with the authors about their book, the impact AlphaZero has (and will have) on our royal game and whether chess will be solved one day in the light of such technological advancements.

12/15/2018 – Here's a handy guide for future reference. We present one-click access to all the special guests that you may have missed from the great 'Today in Chess' shows, courtesy the Saint Louis Chess Club. Garry Kasparov was a regular, but they also received virtual visits from Vladimir Kramnik, Viswanathan Anand, Peter Leko and more. Plus all the ChessBase contributors (video and text) annotations in once place.

12/13/2018 – The Kasparov Chess Foundation (KCF) and The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis (CCSCSL) have run the very successful Young Stars program for 'Team USA' for the past six years. Meet the latest crop of talented kids from the recent New York training session. Plus, In a new article, Garry Kasparov reminds us that the recent World Championship match did not represent "a contest between the two strongest chess players on the planet, only the strongest humans." Brute force programs have long exceeded human playing strength. But that does not end the historical role of chess as a laboratory of cognition. A new pure AI system has superseded even those programs. Kasparov evaluates AlphaZero's play in Science Magazine and gives a political interview in the prestigious magazine The New Yorker. | Photo DeepMind Technologies, Igor Khodzinskiy