Yugoslav grandmaster Mato Damjanovic passed away on Saturday, reportedly while playing a game at his chess club. Damjanovic was Yugoslavia's first reserve board at the Leipzig Olympiad in 1960 and an active and strong tournament player in the sixt...
Last year's winner Le Quang Liem is doing well again at the strong Aeroflot Open in Moscow. The Vietnamese grandmaster is the only player on 5 points out of 6 games, which includes a crushing win againt top seed Gata Kamsky. There are three more r...
The F.E.B. #7 is out! IM Lawrence Trent and GM Steven Gordon analyze Nakamura's triumph by the seaside, what Levon Aronian's missing, Anish Giri's new celebrity, plus Magnus Carlsen's "Wii" habits, Polish tongue twisters, Wes So contemplates unive...
Last week the second team of the Hamburg Chess Club HSK organized an endgame studies solving contest as a team building activity. The contest consisted of twelve studies composed by Yochanan Afek, and was won by special guest GM Jan Gustafsson. On...
Le Quang Liem (pictured) is the sole leader of the huge Aeroflot Open after five out of nine rounds have been completed. The young Vietnamese star has only given up one draw so far, with his victims including top seeded Gata Kamsky in a one-sided...
Related to last week's article about Anand and Karpov playing on the train between Madrid and Valencia, here's a brief video which we found on YouTube, about two chess players in a train. The person on the right, playing the white pieces, is Paul...
Without wishing to overdose on the open letters that chess players and organisations appear so fond of, it seems only fair to publish the official responses to the complaints raised by some of the competitors at the recently held Womens' World Cha...
New: Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall.Acclaimed biographer Frank Brady, who first met Bobby Fischer when the prodigy was just ten years old, has written a breathtaking and unique full-length biography containing more than 400(!) p...
In the week after his succesful Tata tournament, Anish Giri appeared on national TV, in a very popular talk show. A day later he gave a simul against members of the Dutch parliament. Adding more fuel to the fire, the 16-year-old grandmaster recent...
In what could be loosely described as the unofficial world championship of chess engines, free chess engine Houdini beat commercial engine Rybka. The match lasted forty games and the final score was 23.5-16.5. Organizer Martin Thoresen: "I think o...
For our ChessVibes Openings editors it was not difficult to pick a Game of the Week - of course they analyzed the spectacular Blumenfeld Gambit of Korchnoi-Vallejo, Gibraltar 2011. And there's more romanticism in this week's CVO #110: what to thin...
Open letters... somehow it's the preferred means of communication in the chess world. Today we received an open letter from FIDE Vice President Israel Gelfer, directed to Malcolm Pein, CEO of Chess Promotions Limited. The World Chess Federation re...
By means of a lengthy Word document sent to chess media on Tuesday, the Turkish Chess Federation responds to the open letter written by 18 participants of the 2010 Women's World Championship. "The only good part of this painful incident is that it...
A few days ago the organisers of the London bid for the 2012 World Chess Championship withdrew their offer to host the event, as reported here. FIDE has now responded with an open letter claiming that the real reason that the London bid was wit...
We have just received: The Improving Annotator! Chess master, author, and renowned teacher Dan Heisman started to annotate his own games at the age of sixteen and over the next three years his rating rose 600(!) points. In this book Heisman sh...
Vassily Ivanchuk’s stunning win in Gibraltar reminded us all of his enormous chess talent, while his recent long interview with the Ukrainian Zaxid.net addressed the missing piece of the jigsaw – why is it that a genius like Ivanchuk has failed to...
FIDE has confirmed the pairings for the Candidates Matches that will take place in Kazan, Russia, from 3-27 May 2011. The pairings are exactly as expected according to the regulations, so the first round matches are as follows:  Topalov    Ka...
Like he had done before, after the 11th round of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament David Navara unexpectedly entered the press room and voluntarily showed his game. The Czech grandmaster, who would eventually qualify for the A group together with En...
The pairings for the upcoming FIDE Candidates matches are Topalov vs Kamsky, Kramnik vs Radjabov, Aronian vs Grischuk and Gelfand vs Mamedyarov. This was confirmed today by FIDE on its website. The matches will be held 3rd to 27th May, 2011 in Kaz...
Although dozens of strong GMs and IMs participated, the open section of the Moscow Open Festival was won by an untitled player. Vladimir Belous, rated 2497, finished on 8/9. Boris Grachev and Alexandra Kosteniuk won special round-robins for young ...
The main nine-round Swiss event at the Moscow Open has been won by an untitled player Vladimir Belous of Russia in a shock result. 17 year-old Belous, rated 2497 Elo beat off fierce competition from many Grandmasters to take first place outright ...
Darren Aronofsky's new movie Black Swan, featuring Natalie Portman as the increasingly tormented ballet dancer Nina who has to perform the dual role of both the white and the black swan in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, left me both puzzled and ...
If you're hungry for ample helpings of top-quality chess games then Moscow is currently serving up a veritable feast of gargantuan proportions. Just coming to a climax is the Moscow Open which actually comprises of NINE separate tournaments held ...
This weekend two matches of the 7th round and the regular matches of the 8th and 9th round of the Schachbundesliga are played. The playing venues are Eppingen, Wattenscheid, Remagen and Mülheim. All pairings and information.At Eppingen the host an...
