The fourth game of the Caruana-Carlsen world championship match once again ended in a draw, but not before some interesting positions. "He seems to have out-prepared me so far as Black," Carlsen said of this game. Find out why with analysis from one of the most famous chess players in history, GM Yasser Seirawan.
The final of the women's world championship will be played between Ju Wenjun of China and Kateryna Lagno of Russia. Ju will be defending her crown in a match over four classical games. "A fight is not won by one punch or kick, so either learn to endure or hire a bodyguard" was something Bruce Lee might have told our semi-finalists of the women's knockout world championship in Khanty-Mansiysk. As there is no bodyguard substitute for the game of chess, enduring was all our semi-finalists could do. For...
GM Jonathan Tisdall's reflections on the Carlsen-Caruana World Championship at halftime. (You can read his preview of the match here.) For convenience, we've copied the games with GM Sam Shankland's annotations from our news reports. I arrived in London for Game 5, exchanging the weird sense of omnipresent national fervor for the long absent joy of experiencing this most intense of all chess events live and up close. Yes, in many ways watching from the comfort of your home with a plethora of excellent...
Fabiano Caruana is playing for the win! With the black pieces, he employs his famous Petroff Defense against Magnus Carlsen and has the champion on the ropes! Don't miss GM Alex Yermolinsky's post-game analysis.
Last week, I was in London for business, and of course I paid a visit to the World Championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana. It wasn't my first World Championship visit. In 2013, for instance, I had the opportunity to visit the Anand-Carlsen match in Chennai, India. As I wrote at the time in my blog post about that amazing event, my experience with World Championship matches hadn't been particularly lucky up until that point. And as I stood outside in front of the entrance...
A plus-one score was enough for Maxime Vachier-Lagrave to win the 2018 Shenzen Masters in China. The French GM edged out Anish Giri and Ding Liren on tiebreak after all finished on 5.5/10. It was Vachier-Lagrave's victory over Ding Liren, from round six, that got him the better tiebreak—a special game indeed. After Ding had remained undefeated for exactly 100 games, thereby improving Mikhail Tal's streak in the 1970s by five games, he went down in a spectacular encounter with MVL. Maxime...
It's the biggest chess event of the year as World Champion Magnus Carlsen will try to defend his title against the American challenger Fabiano Caruana. The 2018 world chess championship will run November 9-28, and you can follow it all on Chess.com. Game seven will start Sunday, November 18 at 7 a.m. Pacific time (10 a.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. London/GMT. Your local time: ). Caruana will play Black and Carlsen will play White in game seven. The match is scheduled for 12 games plus...
It has been 16,878 days since an American has won a game in an undisputed world championship match (Spassky vs Fischer, game 21, Aug. 31, 1972). And since the top American is not a supercomputer, it will be at least two more. In today's round six of the 2018 world chess championship, Fabiano Caruana pressed in a piece-for-three-pawns ending, but missed an incredibly opaque forced win against Magnus Carlsen. Yes, the Norwegian supercomputer "Sesse" announced mate in 30, but even top grandmaster...
Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana drew their sixth game of the 2018 world chess championship. The champion opened with 1. e4 for the first time, and the challenger answered with his trusty Petroff Defense. The opening 20 plies featured quite a knight dance, as 15 of those moves came from knights. Even so, the board become somewhat symmetric, until Caruana applied some pressure. Carlsen bailed out into a piece-for-three-pawns ending, and it was good enough to hold the draw in...
