The European Individual Championship is a gigantic brawl, and since it began in 2000 the winner has always been a seasoned grandmaster. This year’s event in Katowice, Poland, drew 500 competitors, including 90 grandmasters. Lasting 11 rounds, it is not the kind of event you can win ‘by chance’. So it was astonishing to see
While the open Candidates was a procession – Javokhir Sindarov clinched the event with a round to spare – the women’s event could not have been more different. With one round remaining, six out of eight players retained a chance of winning the tournament. Leading on 7.5/13 were Rameshbabu Vaishali from India and Bibisara Assaubayeva
Javokhir Sindarov from Uzbekistan dominated the 2026 Fide Candidates tournament, which concluded in Cyprus earlier in April. His ten points from 14 games is a record in the modern all-play-all format, and he was the only player to get through the tournament without loss. Sindarov, who became a grandmaster at the age of 12, rises
More than 3,500 players convened in Karlsruhe, Germany over the Easter weekend to take part in the Grenke Chess Festival. The flagship event was the Freestyle Chess Open, and Magnus Carlsen’s advocacy for Freestyle chess (also known as Fischer-Random, or Chess960), in which the pieces on the back rank are rearranged randomly at the start
Javokhir Sindarov from Uzbekistan has dominated the first half of the Candidates Tournament in Cyprus, with an astonishing start of six points from the first seven games. That puts the 20-year-old 1.5 points clear of his closest pursuer Fabiano Caruana, and makes him a huge favourite. The tournament winner earns the right to challenge for
Participants at the Winton British Solving Championship face six rounds of fiendishly difficult chess problems. The problems have an exam-style rubric, where marks are given for the right answer, but also for relevant variations to the main idea. Each round contains a different genre of problem: mate in two, mate in three, longer mates, helpmates,
Fifteen-year-old Frederick Waldhausen Gordon was a surprise winner at the British Rapidplay Championship, held in Peterborough earlier this month. The teenager from Scotland was seeded just 25th in a field which contained seven grandmasters, including England team regulars Gawain Maroroa Jones and Michael Adams. After eight rounds (out of 11), Maroroa Jones had won all
Oxford began as small favourites for the 144th Varsity Match, held at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, London, earlier in March. But it was Cambridge who pulled ahead first, thanks to wins from Rajat Makkar on top board, as well as captain Remy Rushbrooke, who was awarded the Brilliancy Prize for the finish below.
Nodirbek Abdusattorov continued his formidable run with victory at the Prague Masters, adding to triumphs at the Tata Steel Masters in January and the London Chess Classic in December. The Uzbek grandmaster now sits fourth in the world on live ratings, making his absence from the Candidates tournament, which begins at the end of March,
There is a persistent contrarian view that the world’s top players maintain their high ratings by being part of a closed shop. According to that theory, the same players get invited to all the same tournaments, where they face each other repeatedly, and the prevalence of draws between closely matched players means that nobody’s rating
Jan Timman, the Dutch grandmaster who at his peak reached second place in the world rankings, died in February at the age of 74. For much of the 1980s, when Soviet players (especially Karpov and Kasparov) dominated the game, Timman was regarded as the ‘Best of the West’. As a young man, Timman was drawn to the bohemian
Since Magnus Carlsen abdicated his classical world championship crown in 2022, the international chess federation (Fide) has faced a persistent headache: the world’s strongest player has no interest in their flagship event. Fide has responded by adding new formats in which world titles are contested, to encourage Carlsen’s participation. Early in 2026, they sanctioned the
‘This is why you don’t do puzzles, kids,’ drawled Magnus Carlsen, after a lucky escape in a recent blitz game played on Chess.com. ‘Because if this is a puzzle you see it immediately. But in puzzles, you’re trained to see puzzles, while in games, you’re not.’ No doubt Carlsen has done his fair share of
The 2026 Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee saw a commanding performance from Nodirbek Abdusattorov, who claimed outright victory with nine points from 13 games. It’s a pity, then, that the young Uzbek won’t be competing in the upcoming Candidates Tournament – the event that will determine Gukesh’s next world championship challenger. Abdusattorov’s recent
The ‘Wimbledon of Chess’ is underway in the Netherlands. Meanwhile in Spain, there’s a gaming industry expo. Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, the world’s no. 1 and no. 2, are at the trade show, where they had a fireside chat with YouTuber Levy Rozman – better known as GothamChess. One theme was how much chess has changed
The January 2026 Fide junior rankings tell a remarkable story: at the top sits Gukesh Dommaraju from India, who in 2024 became the youngest world champion in history. Still just 19 years old, he will defend the title later this year. The real shock is that the second-place spot now belongs to a 14-year-old: Yagiz
British chess has lost an inspiring figure. Grandmaster Jonathan Hawkins, two-time British champion, author and coach, died on 22 December at just 42 years old after battling a neuroendocrine carcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer. Hawkins’s achievements in chess are remarkable for answering a perennial question: can adult improvers really aspire to significant progress?
Magnus Carlsen’s relationship with Fide is frayed, all the more following the spat at the 2024 World Rapid and Blitz Championships in New York, when the world no. 1 was penalised for wearing jeans. The Norwegian said it was his good relations with the Qatari organisers, and his domestic fans, for whom following the event has
When I lose a game of chess, I tend to know exactly where it went awry. Take the following position, where I faced Alireza Firouzja at the XTX Markets London Chess Classic, held at the Emirates Stadium in December. Firouzja, rated in the world top ten, was the top seed at the Elite section, and
1) A pair of jeans fetched $36,100 at a charity auction in March. Whose were they, and what was special about them? 2) In April, Tunde Onakoya and Shawn Martinez set a Guinness World Record for the longest chess marathon, playing in New York’s Times Square. How long did they last? 3) ‘In chess, the