8/20/2019 – Some people keep a Komodo dragon in their yard, and some keep it in their living room, safely inside their computer! In this interview with Grandmaster Larry Kaufman, one of the creators of Komodo, the World Chess Software Champion, we gain new insight into the latest release of the popular chess program. Komodo has gained strength both in the standard version, but particularly in the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), making the engine a valuable research tool for correspondence games, and openings.

8/13/2019 – It's a semi-secret development, an AlphaZero clone, engineered over the past nine months for ChessBase. Fat Fritz was tested by some of the best players in the world, who expressed unmitigated delight over the ideas and improvements it came up with. Now the program is publicly available on the ChessBase Engine Cloud. And it is running on awesome hardware. ALBERT SILVER explains.

6/16/2019 – AlphaZero changed the chess world and the way chess players think. But how does the program think and what makes its chess so special? In their book "Game Changer" Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan give answers and present a lot of games by AlphaZero. Carl Portman liked the book so much that he invited Sadler and Regan for a simul and a lecture about AlphaZero. Which was instructive and fun. | Carl Portman

2/21/2019 – Last year's World Chess Championship in London was an exciting affair. All twelve games were drawn, and not everyone was there for the final tiebreak day, to see Carlsen win three games and retain his crown. But Frederic Friedel did attend the spectacular opening gala and the first two rounds. He describes the many interesting people he met and the impressions they left. This is the first in a series on chess-related encounters.

2/18/2019 – In the first two sections of this series, originally published in Der Spiegel, Europe's largest (and most influential) news portal, Frederic Friedel described his decades-long involvement in computer chess. He was commissioned to make the story personal, and in part three he describes his encounter with the latest twist in this area of research: artificial intelligence and self-learning machines that are playing at the very highest levels of the game. Where are we headed and what will the future bring?

2/3/2019 – True Agony! Columnist GM JON SPEELMAN briefly rifs on AlphaZero and Giri-Shankland before turning his attention to this week's submission from Zimbabwean Class A player, Tapiwa Allister Gora. Feel free to send in your own games! Jon can always use more material from readers. If your games are selected for the Agony column, not only will you get free detailed commentary of your games by one of chess’s great authors and instructors, and former world no. 4 player, but you also win a free three-month ChessBase Premium Account! | Photo: Tapiwa Gora (right) vs Simon Bokamoso at a recent tournament

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.

12/19/2018 – The London Chess Classic was a top tournament in which four of the world's best players took part. But the London Chess Classic was also an event in which young children could see, feel and express the passion for chess - a life-changing experience. | Photos: London Chess Classic

12/17/2018 – Live games and commentary from the 10th London Chess Classic, the final leg of the 2018 Grand Chess Tour. All rounds start at 15:00 CET (14:00 UTC) with commentary by GM Yasser Seirawan, WGM Jennifer Shahade, GM Maurice Ashley, GM Cristian Chirila and GM Alejandro Ramirez.

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

12/11/2018 – The 10th London Chess Classic is underway with the semifinal played at the headquarters of Google's DeepMind. Demis Hassibis (pictured in the background) joined tournament director Malcolm Pein and a schoolgirl — learning chess under the Chess in Schools and Communities umbrella — on stage at the start of the first classical game. Yesterday, at the London Pro-Biz Cup, chess-loving business people or celebrities joined grandmasters taking turns in a tandem chess team tournament. Garry Kasparov was among the professionals, but it was the team of Roiko Vujatovic and David Howell that won. | Photos: Lennart Ootes

12/11/2018 – There was not much of a breather for Fabiano Caruana after his defeat in the tiebreak at the World Championship. He is back in London joining Hikaru Nakamura, Levon Aronian and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave as the four players qualified for the London Chess Classic, the final leg of the 2018 Grand Chess Tour, from December 11th to 17th. Can Caruana regain his mojo in rapid chess against Nakamura? Meanwhile, the top four players in England fight for the British Knockout Championship in a parallel semifinal and final.

6/25/2018 – IM Malcolm Pein, now a candidate for FIDE Deputy President, took time out from a full schedule for a chat with Macauley Peteron in Leuven at the end of the "Your Next Move Rapid and Blitz" tournament. Malcolm discussed the Grand Chess Tour, the FIDE / Agon proposed "broadcast policy," the upcoming World Championship in London, and his thoughts on the election including having his old friend Nigel Short as a political sparring partner. | Photo: Lennart Ootes / Grand Chess Tour

4/26/2018 – It might sound like a joke, but it is not: the revolutionary techniques used to create Alpha Zero, the famous AI chess program developed by DeepMind, are now being used to engineer an engine that runs on the PC. This project has now been underway for about two months, and the engine, Leela Chess Zero, is already quite strong, playing at 2700 on good hardware, and is freely available. As will be seen, just about every aspect of this new engine is revolutionary and breaks all the paradigms that had dominated the field until now.

12/13/2017 – Garry Kasparov's match against the IBM computer Deep Blue was considered a milestone in Artificial Intelligence, a watershed moment. But was it really that? Kasparov has written a number of best-selling books on chess and other subjects, but his latest work, Deep Thinking, could be the most important one. It puts his 1997 defeat at the hands of a brute force computer and the latest development of self-learning systems into perspective. Who do you think is the ideal person to review this book?

12/13/2017 – In time for the start of the London Chess Classic DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google, published a remarkable report about the success of their "Machine Learning" project Alpha Zero. Alpha Zero is a chess program and won a 100 game match against Stockfish by a large margin. But some questions remain. Reactions from chess professionals and fans.

12/12/2017 – Ian Nepomniachtchi made a quick draw with Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in under 30 minutes giving him a share of first place. But he had to wait nearly six hours to find out that Fabiano Caruana had equaled his score. The pair played an exciting blitz duel, which ended with Caruana as the London Chess Classic champ, while Magnus Carlsen took the overall Grand Chess Tour. Games annotated by GM Daniel Fernandez | Photo: Lennart Ootes

12/11/2017 – The official Grand Chess Tour webcast is a treasure trove of information, and the best, most convenient way to hear directly from the players after nearly every game. But at five hours or more, it can be tiresome to scan through each days full show to find the interesting guests spots. No more! We've pinpointed every major interview for one-click access.