Nova Daily - 11 October 2025: Chess Icons

Hi!

Today was a bit of a chill day for me. I played no games, got some sleep, and wound up winning a Daily game with a nice sacrifice at the end. It deserves to be analysed; I thought that some of my play was nice, but my d5-d6 push may well have been too hasty.

I'll just briefly show the game here.

Props to my opponent for being a good sport about this game. Merci beaucoup pour la partie  

Chess icons

There wasn't much response on yesterday's icons test (if you can call it such). But let's go over them and give a brief overview of what they all are.

This one should be self-explanatory. It's the website you're visiting right this instance.

A chess analysis app for your phone. It tends to slow your entire phone down. Does with mine anyway.

The NNUE that came in response to Alphazero (7) and Stockfish (13). Leela was notorious for spending a long time toying with her prey in her early days.

One of the most prominent chess publishing companies. New In Chess used to be part of the Play Magnus Group and as such was part of chess.com for a brief moment of time, but has since decoupled and merged with Quality Chess (10) and Popular Chess (12). It has many excellent books on its shelves such as How to Study Chess on Your Own and 100 Endgames You Must Know. 

An app for entering and training your opening repertoire. This is the app that tracks how many moves are in my repertoire. It's stuck on the same number for way too long.

A website that most people will know about. In terms of community building, it pales in comparison to chess.com.

The Google NNUE that taught itself chess and was able to beat Stockfish within four hours. A brilliant bit of ingenuity that also raises questions regarding intelligence, the brain, and learning.

The happy pawn is the logo of Chess.com's child-friendly environment. It looks a bit like Gary before he went on his rebellious streak.

Carlsen and Nakamura collaborating is very noteworthy. It has high ambitions and includes a front-row sneak peak at what happens in the world of chess. However, I've yet to interact with this one for the first time.

The publishing company that merged with New In Chess (4) and Popular Chess (12). It has produced some of my main opening repertoire sources, including Marin's books on the English, Ntirlis's work on the same opening, and such classics as The Woodpecker Method and Jacob Aagaard's Grandmaster Preparation series.

Although now (almost) obsolete, Chess24 used to be a place to follow live coverage of high-profile chess tournaments. It merged into Chess.com a while back, but still has an active Twitch channel.

One of the coolest logos in the list. Popular Chess was formerly known as Everyman Chess, and before this, Cadogan Chess. It has many opening book series for starters within its catalogue (Opening Repertoire, Move By Move, First Steps, Dangerous Weapons), but arguably its star series is Garry Kasparov's My Great Predecessors.

One of the strongest chess engines in the world for many years and freely accessible. Stockfish is integrated in the analysis batch of many online chess websites including Chess.com.

An app that I suspect hardly anyone knows about, even though its logo is magnificent. SparkChess is an app on which you can play with bots. The selection is very limited, though.

This app was also part of the Play Magnus Group before it became part of Chess.com. Chessable hosts many books as Trainable courses, but it can also be used as an e-Book app or a platform to amass and create your own books.

A chess analysis app that can even scan positions. Rather like DroidFish (2) it has the tendency to slurp all your phone's computing power and work memory.

All in all, not all of these icons, brands and logos are that well known. There's one among these 16 that was actually new to me when I wrote yesterday's entry.

Several logos represent a strong, reliable and high-quality brand that delivers excellent user-friendly reliable content, service and experience. Chess.com is currently the largest and strongest brand in the world of chess.

Even in chess, marketing means a great deal. It has positive sides, but it also has some shadows in that some entities in the global chess landscape become so powerful and influential that their decisions influence the way that the game will be going. It pays to be aware of these.

Yesterday's game

Going over my yesterday's game, it became clear that my opponent tried for some opening shenanigans and tried mostly crazy stuff, but never got enough play for the sacrificed material. I do appreciate my opponent's bold approach. Apart from it showing a nice degree of pugnacity, it also gives me the opportunity to look at this line, and to strike it off the list of things I'd ever need to be scared of in the future.

Because I'm dealing with hardware matters, this will only be a brief analysis of the things that came up during yesterday's coverage.