He probably never had a worse start at the Chess Classic. On the first day of the GRENKELEASING Rapid World Championship, World Champion Viswanathan Anand lost his first two games and now has to worry about qualifying for the final. Earlier on Fri...
Ukrainian chess has great strength in depth at the top levels of chess, with four players rated over 2700 Elo (Ponomariov, Karjakin, Eljanov and Ivanchuk), and another 12 over 2600 Elo. However, 19 year-old Sergey Karjakin will henceforth be play...
GM Erwin l'Ami is Open Dutch Champion 2009. In the last round on Thursday he drew in 10 moves with Jan Timman after which there was only one player left who could still end on 7.5/9 as well: the surprise of the tournament, FM Roi Miedema, who had ...
Hikaru Nakamura (pictured) has clearly got the hang of Chess960! After a disappointing first day in the qualification round-robin, he won all three of games on the second day to book his place in the final against Aronian. Nakamura's form contin...
There's just no stoppin' him. U.S Champ and Donostia winner Hikaru Nakamura last night defeated Levon Aronian three times in a row to clinch the Chess960 "World title" in the most convincing manner. Movsesian won the match for third place against ...
We have just received from Chess Information and Research Centre (CIRC) the revised and updated 2nd edition of Pirc Alert! In this 448 pages book (the first edition dates back from 2001) GMs Lev Alburt and Alex Chernin explain the winning ideas as...
All last-round games ended in a draw and so Maxime Vachier-Lagrave became the surprising winner of the Biel Chess Festival today. The Frenchman stayed undefeated, finished on 6/10 and scored the biggest success of his career so far.The Biel Chess ...
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (pictured) won the Biel GM Tournament with a score of 6/10, half a point ahead of Vassily Ivanchuk and Alexander Morozevich. Maxime drew his last 2 games, but it proved enough to win since Chucky lost to Moro in the penulti...
Especially Nakamura was determined to do better on the 2nd day, and decided to spend more time in the difficult Chess960 opening phase. This approach brought the American three wins, and qualification for today's final, where he will meet Aronian,...
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave is the surprising leader at the Biel Chess Festival after nine rounds. The Frenchman drew quickly with Gelfand today and saw co-leader Ivanchuk losing to Morozevich, while Alekseev and Caruana also split the point.The Biel C...
Levon Aronian scored 3 out of 3 against Bologan, Movsesian and Nakamura during the first day of the Rapid Chess960 World Championship, part of the Mainz Chess Classic. At the moment of writing they're playing their second stage of preliminaries.Th...
The Chess Tigers Mainz Classic is underway with it's usual entertaining variety of events. Lev Aronian (pictured) sparkled on the first day of the 'Chess 960 Rapid World Championship' winning all three of his fascinating games against Nakamura, M...
The 2009 British Chess Championships is underway in Torquay. This huge event features over 800 competitors in total, taking part in opens, junior championships (for every age from 16 down to 8!), and many other competitions, with the National Cha...
Alekseev and Gelfand sharpened the Biel record and drew in just 11 moves, but the other two games still made the 8th round in Biel the most spectacular thus far. Vachier-Lagrave defeated Morozevich with Black in an absolutely amazing game, but Iva...
From July 11th to 18th the Ikaros Chess Festival was organized for the 32nd time and as always it attracted a lot of foreign players who intended to combine vacation with their hobby. IM Robert Ris reports on Greek sun, chess and hospitality. By I...
The Mainz Chess Classic has a variety of fun events. It has an open action event, and an open Fischer Random action event. It also has World Championships in both action chess and Fischer Random (action), each of which features 4 players: the defe...
Rounds 7 and 8 at the Biel GM tournament finally saw some potentially decisive breaks from the pack in this 6-player, 10 round event. The main beneficiary is 18 year-old Frenchman Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (pictured) who comfortably outplayed Caruan...
New In Chess 2009/5 is just out!One of the highlights is Miguel Illescas looking back at two matches in which he helped to defeat Kasparov: "maybe I am bringing bad luck to Garry".Some other topics you can expect in its over 100 pages:-- Nigel Sho...
Morozevich recovered well from his two losses by adding another victory to his score. The Russian beat Gelfand in round 7 of the Biel Chess Festival and is back on top again, sharing the lead with Ivanchuk, who drew with Alekseev, and Vachier-Lagr...
There are so many chess tournaments taking place during summer that it's hardly possible to keep track. In this post we'll have a look of four that finished recently. Romain won in Andorra, Wojtaszek was the strongest at the Najdorf memorial, Negi...
The 24th international rapid chess tournament in Villarrobledo, Spain took place from 25-26th July, with 124 competitors slugging it out for the title won by Veselin Topalov last year. At the end of the 9 round Swiss event, it was the German Gran...
After examining Planet Nisipeanu in the precedent column in this series, we now continue our cosmological research with a look on a bright new phenomenon that appeared on the horizon: Ian Nepomniachtchi. This week the Russian grandmaster will face...
Anish Giri, the youngest grandmaster in the world (he turned 15 only a month ago), is dominating the Dutch Open Championship so far. He is the only player with a 100% score after five rounds, and leads by a full point with 4 games to go.The Open D...
Alexander Morozevich suffered his second consecutive loss with the black pieces in round six at the Biel GM tournament. After obtaining a good position out of the opening, Moro was trying to press home his advantage when he erred badly with 43......
