Magnus Carlsen scored back-to-back wins on Thursday to take the lead at the Grenke Chess Classic in Karlsruhe. Carlsen defeated Vincent Keymer and former leader Richard Rapport to go into the res...
Take a look at this picture. It is not a Hollywood star, but a chess celebrity. Can you recognize him? Capablanca, Nezhmetdinov, Frank Marshall? No, not any of them! The answer is Andor Lilientha...
The American Cup, one of the United States’ premier chess tournaments, returns to Saint Louis. Now in its third year, the event runs from March 12-21, 2024, at the iconic World Chess Hall of Fa...
Chess is a really fun game to play, but equally enjoyable is solving artificial positions – problems and studies – many that defy the imagination. In this ChessBase Challenge instalment, we h...
Have you ever finished last in a tournament? Well, it happened to Vidit Gujrathi at the Prague Masters 2024. As Vidit himself pointed out, this might be the first time ever that he finished last ...
"As arbiters, we must first and foremost have full knowledge of the Laws of Chess. The Laws of Chess are like the Bible, everything starts there." In this article IA Alon Shulman shares his thoug...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/how-to-work-with-the-laws-of-chess
Chess players have certainly heard of Daniel Fernandez, who has already published a couple of Fritztrainers for ChessBase. But recently, non-chess players also got to know him because of a YouTub...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/behind-the-board-an-interview-with-gm-daniel-fernandez
Magnus Carlsen has been the World #1, since 2011! Apart from his tremendous chess talent, he also has a relatively higher HRV: his heart rate is typically between 75 bpm – 95 bpm, which enables...
Nodirbek Abdusattorov is the sixth champion of the prestigious chess festival. In the process the the 19-year-old Usbek grandmaster rose to the fourth position in the world live ranking, ahead of...
Tata Steel 2024: Analyses of the tournament winner Wei Yi as well as Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Alexander Donchenko, Alireza Firouzja, Anish Giri, Erwin l'Ami, Praggnanandhaa, Eline Roebers and Vidit...
In the recent Freestyle event, heart rates of the players were measured in classical chess, with slow time controls. In bullet and blitz formats, where intuition prevails, heart rates remain rela...
Chess is often considered a calm and quiet game, where the only sound is the clicking of the pieces. But what if we could hear the heartbeat of the players, and see how their body reacts to the t...
The Kasparov Chess Foundation Academy invites you to watch an interview with grandmaster Elisabeth Paehtz, one of the strongest German female chess players since her youth. On February 25, 17:00 ...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/elisabeth-paehtz-interview-on-kasparov-chess-foundation
In the concluding article for the Christmas Composition Contest, we see the final prize-winning compositions, which were a touch ahead of the others! Like always, all compositions were evaluated ...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/chessbase-puzzle-competition-winners
Chess960 or Freestyle chess will soon be the centre of attention. The 1st German Chess960 Championship will take place in Berlin, Germany, on 9 February and in the German spa Weissenhaus at the B...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/chess960-or-freestyle-chess-how-it-all-began
With new money and new sponsors pouring in, and never before seen numbers of spectators following the games, the tendency is towards faster time controls. Classical games are played with reduced ...
Today we provide you with a master-level lesson. Leonid Ivanovich Kubbel, born in 1891 in St. Petersburg, Russia, was one of the greatest composers in chess history. One of the greatest composers...
Should there ever be an underrated underdog, it would be Shreyas Royal. In the London Chess Classics, the 14-year-old IM, had to face nine Grandmasters! With his ELO rating of 2404, he had a rati...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/never-underestimate-the-royals-the-underdog
Let's say you find an interesting mating motif. Now you want to use it as the final position of a chess problem you will compose. The moves leading to it must be imaginative, clever and not very ...
Playing chess is an immensely popular activity. Solving chess problems is also very enjoyable. But how about composing problems? During our revived Christmas Puzzle week, we want to discuss diffe...
For two decades we ended each year with traditional Christmas puzzles – here are some of the best from the early years. Many of our younger readers will not have seen them – remember, some of...
ChessBase India, together with several partners and supported by the Government of Tamil Nadu, is organising the Chennai Masters 2023, the strongest classical chess tournament in the history of I...
The name "Hastings" has a very special ring to it in the chess world. In 1895 one of the most important tournaments in chess history took place in the seaside resort on the south-east coast of En...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/chess-tradition-in-hastings-an-interview-with-juergen-brustkern
As it is already well-known, chess is a game of repeated motifs; a game of repeated knowledge! Once you carefully and correctly learn a motif, a pattern or an opening, your subconscious carefully...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/efstratios-grivas-repetead-motifs
The 13th edition of the London Chess Classic is taking place on December 1-10 as a 10-player single round-robin with a classical time control. The event features nine super grandmasters, includin...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/london-chess-classic-2023-live
Albin's Counter Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4 e5) has been, and still is, a rare guest at top level tournaments, and is hardly ever seen in the practice of the world champions. The variation is considered...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/chess-as-setting-gambit-by-rex-stout
World Chess has announced the release of the first-ever chess map of the world, one that blends the intricate worlds of chess and geography. This unique cartographic creation, where continents an...
The FIDE Grand Swiss is taking place on the Isle of Man from October 25 to November 11. An open event and a women’s event are being played concurrently. Both tournaments are 11-round Swiss open...
The new Fritz is coming soon - Fritz 19, the World Chess Software Champion 2023, will be available on 14 November and offers a variety of useful tools. It is a good sparring partner, you can impr...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/coming-soon-fritz-19-world-chess-software-champion
India is on its way to becoming the biggest super-power in chess. Some of the credit goes to ChessBase India, which has organized a large number of projects to foster this development. CEO Sagar ...
Zachary Saine is thechessnerd, a 22-year-old content creator and Twitch streamer. The Canadian is a student at Amsterdam University and is playing in as many European chess tournaments as he can....
He is an internist, a gastroenterologist at a Berlin hospital. He is also an avid chess player. And a photographer, who founded the Valokulta art group. Dr Jan Wähner has sent us some extraordin...
Chess is normally a battle between two intellects. But the game is so rich and multifaceted that it offers much more. For instance, you can create a wealth of imaginative studies and problems, po...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/chess-for-fun-and-entertainment
Last weekend I gave our readers a puzzle which, I said, only a segment of our readers could possibly solve. But even amongst them there were very few who succeeded. One exception: super-talent Gu...
My readers, and all my friends in the chess world, know that I am fond of puzzles. I keep giving the most talented chess players non-chess problems to solve, and they keep coming back for more. H...
On August 6th, to celebrate GM Helmut Pfleger's eightieth birthday, octogenarian puzzle master Werner Keym submitted two very clever little problems in two German newspapers. The puzzles, which h...
Former World Champion Magnus Carlsen has accomplished a significant milestone in his illustrious chess career by capturing his inaugural World Cup title, the only tournament that was missing from...
... and calculations like a Super Grandmaster – which he is. Vidit Santosh Gujrathi, born 1994, attained the GM title at the age of nineteen. In August 2022 he became the second highest rated p...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/vidit-gujarathi-master-advanced-tactics
The junior chess championships of various age categories serve a very important purpose. The talented medal winners get the limelight they need — with the adequate amount of support, these kids...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/thehas-rithmitha-big-thing-in-sri-lanka
Tony Ballard is a Kansas prison inmate who turned a 25-year sentence into a passion for chess. He used the game to teach other inmates critical-thinking skills, and became the Director of Prison ...
"I am thrilled to share some exciting news with you," wrote us ChessBase sysop Angom Nongsha, who had just won the title. Not in chess, but in a related field. "I have emerged victorious in both ...
Exactly 70 years ago today, on May 29, 1953, the world's highest mountain, Everest, was climbed for the first time – a heroic feat, exuberantly celebrated by all. Today, hundreds scale the moun...
The following survey lists all chess players who have reached a top five or top ten status at least once in their career, ranked by their highest position, then in chronological order. Of course,...
By winning game 4 of the rapid tiebreakers — after three draws — Ding Liren became the 17th undisputed world chess champion! Ian Nepomniachtchi seemed to have things under control in the deci...
Recently the brillant Grandmaster and former FIDE World Chess Champion Ruslan Ponomariov visited Hamburg to record his first FritzTrainer, and Arne Kähler used the chance to interview him. Throu...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/interview-with-ruslan-ponomariov
An international Go tournament, the Chunlan Cup, with a $200,000 prize fund, has been wrapped in controversy. In the semifinal round, newcomer Li Xuanhao (China) managed to defeat the reigning wo...
The 2015 World Team Championship saw China winning its first gold medal (out of three) in the tournament. The team was led by Ding Liren on top board, and had its top scorer in 15-year-old Wei Yi...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/throwback-thursday-world-team-championship-2015
Former women's world champion Alexandra Kosteniuk, currently in the top ten of women's chess, is one of several top Russian players who have left the country or criticized the invasion of Ukraine...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/kosteniuk-has-switched-to-switzerland
The European Chess Championship is taking place on 2-14 March 2023 in Vrnjacka Banja, Serbia. The event features more than 480 players from 40 federations, including more than 125 Grandmasters an...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/european-championship-2023-live
Karsten Mueller continues his training series for ambitious amateurs in ChessBase Magazine #212. This time it's about basic techniques in the endgame with rook and pawn against rook. You've proba...
Yochanan Afek (Hebrew: יוחנן אפק), born 1952 in Tel Aviv, is an Israeli chess player, composer, trainer and arbiter. He is the only person to possess international titles at five differen...
In the sixth volume of his FritzTrainer series, Ivan Sokolov, winner of the Olympiad as a coach of Uzbekistan, looks deeply into the ‘supreme discipline’ in chess, the Ruy Lopez, as he shares...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/ivan-sokolov-understanding-middlegames-vol-6-review
Inspired by her months of lonely forest trips in the north of Scandinavia German actress and singer has launched a new album of 14 songs, in the style of German pop, cine-classic and Nordic noir....
Who doesn't know Sesame Street, the American educational children's television series that premiered in 1969 and runs on animation and puppetry. It is one of the longest-running shows in history....
https://en.chessbase.com/post/natasha-rogoff-muppets-in-moscow
In the latest version of ChessBase, there are some huge changes to the software, modifications which add significant improvements to the software! The two main programmers, Matthias Wüllenweb...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/everything-new-in-chessbase-17
Last month World Chess, the company that ran the World Chess Championships, announced its plans to float on the main London Stock Exchange in November, inviting institutional and retail investors...
Can a unit of our army be a friend or foe depending on the circumstances? From experience, we know that the answer is a resounding yes! GM Sundararajan Kidambi explains the beautiful concept of u...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/you-are-your-own-enemy-kidambi
October saw the start of the new Bundesliga season. In ChessBase Magazine #211 participants from various teams comment on their games from the first rounds, including the stars from the cover - P...
In 1968, the American magazine Chess Review introduced Michael Basman as “another bright B” in the tradition of famous British chess players represented by Bird, Blackburne and Burn. "Basman ...
How do you feel when you have to play against an opponent whose rating is some hundred points better than your own? The bold among us will see this as a special incentive. For most of us, however...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/don-t-be-afraid-of-stronger-opponents
Chess Olympiad 2022: Review with analyses by more than 20 players - Ivan Sokolov's writes about "Steps to Gold" - "Special" on World Championship candidate Ding Liren: exclusive collection of 18 ...
It never fails; in time with Magnus’ chessploits, the debate in Norwegian newspapers’ commentary fields rages red hot over whether chess is a sport or athletics, with no surprising conclusion...
This book contains a revealing self-portrait of Abhimanyu Mishra. The youngest grandmaster in the history of chess tells the story of a highly ambitious family project. Supported by his father, m...
In ChessBase Magazine #208, our new author, GM Jan Markos, started his video training series "Practical Tips for the Tournament Player" with an article on "Time Management". In the new issue, CBM...
When the organisation of the 2022 Sinquefield Cup decided, after Round 3, to implement a fifteen-minute delay for the broadcast of moves, we felt some gratification. Hadn't we suggested exactly t...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/revisited-15-minute-broadcast-delay
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 ex...
"Surprisingly often I watch sequences of moves in games that do not remind me of anything from my previous chess memory," writes endgame study composer Steffen Slumstrup Nielsen. In such cases, h...
Britain’s first-ever outdoor chess festival, ChessFest, attracted thousands of visitors at London’s Trafalgar Square, and featured a varied programme of fun activities, including live chess g...
On May 7, 2022 the world received sad news when it was announced from Moscow that Yuri Averbakh passed away. Averbakh excelled in many fields and at this peak he was one of the world's best ten p...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-world-s-greatest-endgame-expert-yuri-averbakh
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 Ch...
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 ...
The tenth edition of the Norway Chess Tournament is taking place from May 31 to June 10 in Stavanger. A 10-player single round-robin, the event uses a unique format: in case of a draw in the clas...
What is he up to these days? He is difficult to reach – his almost daily appearance on international news report, meetings with influential figures, his copious writing in the media, those are ...
This article, which appeared in the June issue of the British Magazine CHESS, is about two Grandmasters of Chess Composition – Oleg Pervakov and Christopher Jones – and about books they have ...
Can you imagine a chess book, written by a master, which contains exactly one chess diagram, and the notation of a single 17-move game? And that you would not be able to put it down? That is what...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/asa-hoffmann-new-york-chess-hustler
Who am I? Tactician or position player? Attacker or defender? Should I play 1.d4 or 1.e4? Sicilian or French? If you know your strengths and weaknesses you will score more points and you will be ...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/player-types-an-interview-with-karsten-mueller
Cobicistat is a drug that was originally devised for HIV/AIDS therapy. Now a new study shows that it can inhibit the replication of SARS-CoV-2 – which would mean we could have a powerful therap...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/can-a-chess-grandmaster-save-the-world-2
The last two spots in the upcoming Candidates Tournament will be decided in the FIDE Grand Prix Series, with the second leg of the series taking place in Belgrade on March 1-14. The new format co...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/fide-grand-prix-2022-leg-2-live
The last two spots in the upcoming Candidates Tournament will be decided in the FIDE Grand Prix Series, with the first leg of the series taking place in Berlin on February 4 to 17. The new format...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/fide-grand-prix-2022-leg-1-live
The "Battle of the Sexes" in Gibraltar is a ten-round Scheveningen match between ten male and ten female players. Before the 10th and final round the men (team Sabino) are three points ahead and ...
When Boris Spassky, World Champion from 1969 to 1972, had to play the Sicilian with the white pieces, he seemed to get particularly inspired. Today, the living legend from Leningrad turns 85, and...
In 2020, we started a series called "The Best In", and interviewed some of the strongest male and female players of Aruba, The Bahamas, Brazil, Trinidad & Tobago, Armenia and Austria. The popular...
Remember what "Sensory board chess computers" were like, four decades ago? Bulky, heavy, with complicated installation, and very expensive to buy. Today you get elegant, flat boards, which run on...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/dgt-centaur-the-latest-sensor-board
The King's Gambit continues to pose puzzles. The opening evokes memories of glorious sacrificial games from the romantic era, but at the same time it is regarded as somewhat unsound — as theore...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/joe-gallagher-plays-the-kings-gambit
ChessBase is launching a unique NFT series of the world chess champions, united with their iconic games and moves that have made history in their sublime beauty. Each NFT is authorized by the pla...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/nft-collection-moments-of-genius
When Beth Harmon defeated a series of top male grandmasters, and then went on to wrest the title from Russian world champion Vasily Borgov, it was not real life. It happened in the Queen’s Gamb...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/women-s-chess-it-is-not-biology
Magnus Carlsen picked up a fourth win at the World Championship match in Dubai to secure overall victory with three games to spare. Playing black, the world champion saw Ian Nepomniachtchi all bu...
The adventures we have had with Fritz! A unique experience was a match our program played in the Gulf state of Bahrain, back in 2002. The eight-game struggle ended in a hard-fought 4-4 draw. In a...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/thirty-years-happy-birthday-fritz-6
Last year you could open 24 calendar doors and guess the Fritztrainer correctly. This year it's all about magical endgames. Thanks to our endgame expert GM Dr. Karsten Müller, we have put togeth...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-endgame-magic-christmas-calendar-door-1
"The difference between not the best arbiter and a good one," IA Tomasz Delega writes, in the October issue of the ECU E-magazine, "is that the first one knows the rules and the second one unders...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/chess-arbiters-and-the-three-fold-draw
Look at this position. Black still has all his pieces on the board, while White has just a single pawn, on its original square. So what is the task? "White to play and win" says the composer, one...
After staging the highly successful man-vs-machine match Garry Kasparov vs X3D Fritz, the ever enterprising Armand Rousso launched a search engine, intended to challenge the supremacy of Google. ...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/thirty-years-happy-birthday-fritz-4
Draws on the top 13 boards in the final round of the FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss meant Alireza Firouzja and Fabiano Caruana qualified to the next edition of the Candidates Tournament. Firouzja was...
A few weeks ago, Karsten Müller treated ChessBase readers to another endgame riddle. Charles Sullivan had come across an interesting endgame with opposite-coloured bishops that occurred in Botvi...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/endgame-riddle-botvinnik-vs-pachman-solution
Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So and Sam Sevian finished the 2021 US Championship sharing first place on 6½/11 points. A rapid round robin tournament (10 minutes plus 2-second increments) will decide ...
Magnus Carlsen beat Ian Nepomniachtchi in Armageddon to secure first place at the 2021 Norway Chess Tournament. This is the world champion’s third straight triumph in his home super-tournament....
Sergey Karjakin and Jan-Krzysztof Duda drew their first game of the final at the FIDE World Cup in Sochi — Duda has the white pieces in game 2. Meanwhile, Vladimir Fedoseev (pictured) needs to ...
World Youth Chess Championships are known to produce tons of interesting games and often very surprising and inconsistent results. However, it appears that at least one thing stays fairly consist...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/why-do-some-countries-always-gain-and-other-always-lose-rating-points
After an exciting ninth round and a quieter tenth day of action, 21-year-old Zhansaya Abdumalik secured first place at the Women’s Grand Prix in Gibraltar. Follow the games live with commentary...
This is a 12-year-old on a mission: to become the youngest chess grandmaster in history. Abhimanyu Mishra has made two norms, but in his latest tournament suffered a setback: in time trouble refu...
https://en.chessbase.com/post/abhimanyu-eight-points-from-the-title