The French composer and pianist Jason Kouchak is an enthusiastic amateur chess player with considerable playing strength. He has taken part in various Opens, including the Open in Gibraltar in 2009, where he met a famous contemporary.
Monthly Archives: August 2022
The 2017 World Rapid and Blitz Championship took place on December 26-30 in Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh. The rapid tournament, which included 134 participants, saw Vishy Anand beating Vladimir Fedoseev in a blitz tiebreak after tying for first place with 10½/15 points. Anand, at 47, outscored his younger opponents, including world champion and rapid-play specialist […]
André Hollstein is a professor for information technology and digitisation at the International University of Applied Sciences (with over 90,000 enrolled students). In a podcast for his students and for the general public he interviewe ChessBase co-founder Frederic Friedel. The subject of their discussion: the digitization of chess, and the revolutionary changes ChessBase brought to […]
An important part of chess is about conquering squares! But what do you do once you have gained control over them? How can the advantage of a new stronghold be exploited? All this and much more is shown on this DVD by one of the top five trainers in the world. He tells us how […]
The 2022 World Computer Chess championship was just held, and was the first edition since 2019 and the outbreak of the pandemic. After over two years, the traditional event took place in Vienna, Austria, and the winners were Ginkgo AKA Fritz using new neural net technology, and a powerful new Komodo (free update today!). Don’t […]
In the absence of Russia and China, the young Uzbek team surprised everyone by winning the gold medal at the Chess Olympiad in Chennai. The victory comes at the right time, as the 2026 Chess Olympiad will be held in Tashkent, reports FIDE. But gold for the best individual performances on board 1 and 2 […]
Do you know the Hippopotamus Defence. It is a series of irregular chess opening systems in which Black moves a number of pawns to the sixth rank, and keeps his pieces on the seventh rank. Many experts considered it basically losing, but it has maintained a solid fifty percent for Black, even at the highest […]
The record-breaking 2022 Chess Olympiad came to an end in Chennai, India. After a fighting eleventh round, Uzbekistan and Ukraine were crowned champions in the open and women’s sections respectively. Armenia and India 2 got silver and bronze medals in the open, while Georgia and India completed the podium in the women’s tournament. It was […]
Uzbekistan grabbed gold in the open section of the Chess Olympiad after defeating the Netherlands, ahead of Armenia and India 2. In the women’s tournament, India gave away the lead in the last hurdle with a loss against the United States. Gold thus went to Ukraine thanks to a final-round win over Poland. Georgia and […]
For some time now, we’ve known that the strongest chess engines like to push their flank pawns up the board. This has led to an interesting system, with which we can meet the Grunfeld and the King’s Indian. Studying the mainlines is time consuming, and it is possible that our opponents may know the typical […]