Are you able to play a game of chess without view of the board? Can you solve problems and studies by just looking at a position or a diagram? Well, grandmasters and very strong players can stun us with feats of mental skill that we mortals are scarcely able to comprehend. We start our series […]
Monthly Archives: June 2022
A number of remarkable endgames from the Norway Chess tournament have caught the eye of GM Karsten Müller. In the four games included in this article, our in-house specialist shows examples of pawn races with rooks still on the board, the need to find precise roads in pawn endgames and how to keep a king […]
Le Quang Liem and Pentala Harikrishna are sharing the lead with 3 points after 4 rounds at the Masters section of the Prague Chess Festival. The two co-leaders have three players standing a half point back going into the event’s one rest day. Meanwhile, Vincent Keymer is the sole leader in the Challengers section, also […]
Magnus Carlsen won the Norway Chess Tournament for a fourth time in a row after beating Veselin Topalov in Armageddon on Friday. The world champion would not have grabbed the title had Shakhriyar Mamedyarov defeated Teimour Radjabov in their classical game. Radjabov held the draw despite having almost no time on the clock, allowing Carlsen […]
From the diagram position, Black hunted down the exposed white king with some extraordinary moves. Can you find them all?
Shakhriyar Mamedyarov defeated Vishy Anand to climb to sole second place with a round to go at the Norway Chess Tournament. The Indian star, who was having a great run in Stavanger, made a one-move blunder and immediately resigned the game on move 22. Meanwhile, Magnus Carlsen beat Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in Armageddon to keep the […]
Defending champion Sam Shankland bounced back from his first-round loss against Le Quang Liem by beating Saleh Salem with the white pieces in the Masters section of the Prague Chess Festival. This was the only decisive game of the day. A more eventful second round in the Challengers saw four players scoring wins with white […]
Are you an ‘Activist’, a ‘Theorist’, a ‘Reflector’ or a ‘Pragmatist’, the four types of players identified by Karsten Müller and Luis Engel in their ChessBase course about player types? It might help to know, and in a review in the “New in Chess Magazine” English Grandmaster Matthew Sadler talks about the pros and cons […]
An extremely entertaining first round in the Masters section of the Prague Chess Festival saw Le Quang Liem, David Navara and Pentala Harikrishna scoring the first victories of the event to grab an early lead. Coincidentally, three players also won their first games in the Challengers. All six full points were collected by the player […]
The Prague Chess Festival is taking place on June 8-17 and promises to be a highlight in this year’s chess calendar. The festival includes three invitational tournaments — the Masters, the Challengers and the Futures — besides several open events. Vidit Gujrathi and defending champion Sam Shankland head the field in the Masters, Hans Niemann […]