With one day of blitz to go at the Paris Grand Chess Tour, Sergey Karjakin is one point ahead of Hikaru Nakamura. Wesley So, who lost two games today, is half a point further down.
Today the Paris tournament switched to the blitz time control of five minutes and three seconds delay per move. In this type of chess, Karjakin and Nakamura are known to be specialists, and it showed.
The playing hall during today's fourth round. | Photo: Maria Emelianova/Chess.com.
Karjakin's inspiration...
Despite drawing all his games today, Wesley So retained his lead at the Paris Grand Chess Tour. Before the start of the blitz, Sergey Karjakin and Hikaru Nakamura are trailing him by one point.
"So" mostly stood for "solid" today, as the tournament leader split the point with three of his closest rivals: Nakamura, Karjakin, and Anand. Asked whether he was happy with his score, So replied: "I don't think it could have gone any other way."
Wesley So (2851.8) after winning...
At the very end of my article about MVL's trapped rooks, I mentioned that Tal was famous for his queen play. There was even a joke that a regular queen is worth nine pawns and Tal's queen is worth 12 pawns!
The Chess.com member "fiercebadger" asked in the comment section: "Perhaps you can show us these classic Tal 12-pt queen games?" Thank you for a very good suggestion, fiercebadger!
If a beginner tries to determine a queen's value based on Tal's games, he will be confused for sure....
Hikaru Nakamura and the new Monte Carlo version of Komodo do battle in this epic chess show. Watch Nakamura battle all 20 levels of Komodo on Chess.com before contesting three odds games against full-strength Komodo.
Disclaimer: This is a repost of a post I put up a month ago.
Two weeks ago we looked at White's best play when Black plays the copycat with ...Bf5 (see here). In the meantime I visited London for some philosophy, but now it's time to look at another way in which Black can surprise White: by playing the much rarer ...Bg4
White's strategy here is a bit more varied, but the ideas are similar as against ...Bf5:
1. Try to hunt down or at least harrass the bishop, this time with either...
Wesley So has a slim lead going into the final day of rapid at the Paris Grand Chess Tour. On Thursday the Leuven winner scored 2.5/3, and is chased by Levon Aronian and Sergey Karjakin.
At noon, two hours earlier than the first day, the second triplet of rapid games took off in the Canal+ studio. This way, nobody (but in particular the French TV crew!) had to miss a minute of the French national football team playing Peru at the FIFA World Cup.
Not all the players looked as fresh as they...
1886 was an epic year. Though past players were viewed as the world chess champion, there never was an official title. Now the two best players in the world (Zukertort and Steinitz) would butt heads and the fans of both players would have to accept that the victor was the real deal.
The match was played in three cities: New York, St. Louis, and New Orleans (in honor of Morphy, who died in 1884). It started badly for Steinitz, who won the first game but then lost four games in a row.
After...
The second leg of the 2018 Grand Chess Tour took off today in Paris. After three rounds of rapid, Viswanathan Anand, Levon Aronian and Wesley So are on plus-one.
The Paris Grand Chess Tour is again sponsored by Vivendi, owner of Canal+. The tournament is being held in the company's TV studio in Boulogne-Billancourt in southwest Paris, along the Seine.
This means that again we have a trade-off: on the one hand, the tournament cannot host local spectators but on the other hand there is a professional...
Every day at Chess.com we get a lot of suggestions, feedback and bug reports—and we really appreciate it!
One of the most common bug reports looks something like this:
In my game, I moved my pawn to h4 and somehow his pawn from g4 managed to kill it and jump to h3. Smells suspiciously like hacking.
Or...
During my last game, I moved the pawn forward double space. Which places it beyond the enemy's pawn reach. But his pawn illegally cheated and killed my pawn. Hit replay and you will...
