7/1/2020 – Did you miss it? The Summer Nostos Festival, an international, multidimensional festival that gives us a week bursting with art, conversation, ideas, music, dance, performances, entertainment, and sports, for visitors of all ages, last Saturday streamed a preview of next year's edition. Watch it all, or just the in-depth discussion with Garry Kasparov and Judit Polgar.
new: ChessBase Magazine 225
Chess Festival Prague 2025 with analyses by Aravindh, Giri, Gurel, Navara and others. ‘Special’: 27 highly entertaining miniatures. Opening videos by Werle, King and Ris. 10 opening articles with new repertoire ideas and much more. ChessBase Magazine offers first-class training material for club players and professionals! World-class players analyse their brilliant games and explain the ideas behind the moves. Opening specialists present the latest trends in opening theory and exciting ideas for your repertoire. Master trainers in tactics, strategy and endgames show you the tricks and techniques you need to be a successful tournament player! Available as a direct download (incl. booklet as pdf file) or booklet with download key by post. Included in delivery: ChessBase Magazine #225 as “ChessBase Book” for iPad, tablet, Mac etc.!
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In this video course, Grandmaster Ivan Sokolov explores the fascinating world of Dutch and Grünfelkd structures with colours reversed.
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How has Technology Transformed Chess Competition?
The Summer Nostos Festival welcomed back Russian chess legend Garry Kasparov — widely considered to be the greatest chess player of all time. He was joined by Hungarian chess grandmaster Judit Polgár, the youngest of the renowned Polgár sisters, known as the greatest female chess player of all time.
In this sneak preview of next year’s Nostos University, Kasparov and Polgar examined how technology has transformed competition in chess and beyond. This topic is inspired by the 2021 SNF Conference’s theme of Humanity and Artificial Intelligence. You can learn how these two legendary players embraced chess as children in a world so different from the one chess players know today. You can find out about the barriers they broke through on their way to success and their contributions to major advances in competitive sports.
This stimulating discussion was hosted by former professional football player, mathematician, and chess super-fan, John Urschel. You also get to meet ChessBase co-founder and chess journalist Frederic Friedel, who explains surprising historical details from the early days when chess met computers. Finally, Greek grandmaster Hristos Banikas brings questions from some of his top young students.
The discussion with Kasparov, Polghar and Friedel begins at 1:21:58 into the video. If you want to see the introduction to the with GM Banikas (Greek, with subtitles) go back to 1:12:31.
Festival entertainment
The entire video that was streamed on Saturday is four hours and forty minutes long. Apart from the chess there is quite a bit of entertaining performance to watch. Here some suggestions:
Mark Mitton
He is a professional magician who is fascinated by using magic to better understand how we see the world. In addition to performing at private and corporate events all over the world, and creating magic for film, television, the Broadway stage, and Cirque du Soleil, Mark tirelessly explores the theme of ‘Misdirection’ from an interdisciplinary standpoint. He has performed for Mick Jagger, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, John Mayer, Katy Perry, Salman Rushdie, Sienna Miller, Mark Messier, Sting, Sylvester Stallone, and many others; at festivals in Europe and Asia; at the Olympic Games; in war-torn Liberia; in hospital wards around New York City; and in a Mexican orphanage with members of the band Guster. You can read more about him on his home page.
Mark and his wife Susanna are consulting producers of the Nostos Festival. They staged the video discussion with the chess experts. At Christmas 2019, in preparation, they visited Frederic Friedel in Hamburg, and Mark thoroughly enchanted the Friedel family (above Fred's son Martin and grandchildren Hennes and Enders) with his close-up magical tricks. Here's Mark performing at the Nostos Festival:
There are many other parts of the SNFestival RetroFuture video stream you might enjoy watching. In case you do not have 4¾ hours to watch it all, here are some recommendations:
Suspended Lady – Musical performance on nature, man, and the role of art in modern cities, curated by Dimitris Kamarotos and mezzo-soprano Anna Pangalou
Frederic FriedelEditor-in-Chief emeritus of the ChessBase News page. Studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. In 1986 he co-founded ChessBase.
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The Hyper-Accelerated Dragon is fast, from the very first moves, your bishop heads to g7, seizes the long diagonal, and turns into the most feared piece on the board.
It rewards players who love initiative and clear attacking plans.
The Hyper-Accelerated Dragon is fast, from the very first moves, your bishop heads to g7, seizes the long diagonal, and turns into the most feared piece on the board.
It rewards players who love initiative and clear attacking plans.
The Hyper-Accelerated dragon is fast, from the very first moves, your bishop heads to g7, seizes the long diagonal, and turns into the most feared piece on the board.
It rewards players who love initiative and clear attacking plans.
“Mate is great!” – Tactical training with Oliver Reeh, “The 8th rank” – Andy Woodward analyses his game against Magnus Carlsen from TePe Sigeman 2026, “A modern Nimzo-Indian” – Andrei Volokitin introduces readers to "his" system and much more!
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Slav and Semi-Slav Powerbase 2026 is a database and contains a total of 11 766 games from Mega 2026 or the Correspondence Database 2026, of which 1136 are annotated.
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