Chess

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 since the pandemic. The landscape has shifted away from classical formats toward rapid events, online play and streaming. Both players have shaped that change and thrived in it. But the calendar remains fragmented, with no unified circuit incentivising the top players to compete at the same events. The Barcelona event was a case in point.

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 Kaan Erdogmus from Turkey, recently described by Magnus Carlsen himself as the best 14-year-old the world has ever seen. Having been coached by the Azeri grandmaster Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, who peaked at world no. 2, Erdogmus is already adept at fighting against world-class opposition. When he faced the elite veteran Peter Svidler in a ‘Clash of Generations’ match held in Marseille in July 2025, Erdogmus was a clear underdog on paper.

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? As a young adult, his rating was that of an average club player and, living in northeast England, he had limited access to strong competition or coaching. But his dedicated study over more than eight years was transformative, as set out in his acclaimed 2012 book, Amateur to IM [International Master].

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 become a seasonal tradition, that motivated him to participate at the 2025 event, held in Doha between Christmas and New Year.     Carlsen dominated the rapid event, finishing a full point clear of the field, despite suffering an early setback on the second day of play, when he was beaten by the Russian grandmaster Vladislav Artemiev, who eventually took the silver medal.

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 his canny middlegame play had taken me out of my comfort zone. In the position below, my first instinct was 21 Bxd5, but I was nervous: after 21…Nxd5 22 Qxe5 Bd6 23 Qd4 his active pieces, and my wayward horse on a5, seemed to offer ample compensation for the sacrificed pawn. But then the thought crossed my mind – why trade off my bishop at all? Before I knew it, I had played a howler. Luke McShane-Alireza Firouzja London Chess Classic, December 2025 21 Qxe5??

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 optimal state when you’re playing a game is somewhere between optimistic and delusionally optimistic. Because if you’re realistic, you’re just never going to be opportunistic enough to exploit your opponent’s mistakes.’ So said Magnus Carlsen during an interview with a famous podcaster this year. Which one? 4) Chess has a long history of running afoul of religious strictures, often due to being conflated with gambling games.

Grandmasters do not, as a rule, overlook one-move threats. But when they do, there is a good chance that a retreating knight is the culprit. Take the 1956 Candidates tournament, where Tigran Petrosian (a future world champion), attained an overwhelming strategic advantage as his opponent David Bronstein shuffled his knight back and forth, waiting for the axe to fall. One of these jumps just happened to attack Petrosian’s queen, who failed to notice and moved a different piece forward. Bronstein’s knight moved back again, snapping off the queen, and Petrosian resigned.    The curse of the cavalry claimed yet another victim in the semi-final of the Fide World Cup in Goa.

Generative artificial intelligence is a modern marvel. Should you wish to see an octopus juggling dinner plates in the desert, it is now just a few keystrokes away. Images, videos, poetry, music – everything is possible. But have you ever scrutinised an AI-generated picture of people playing chess? Inevitably, the position will be incoherent. Look closer, and you may find that the board dimensions are wrong, with adjacent corners both white or both black. Squint a bit, and perhaps you will notice squares that are somehow both colours at the same time, like some clumsy knockoff of an M.C. Escher print. Producing anything of real artistic merit turns out to be quite the challenge.

The biennial Fide World Cup underway in Goa is a feast for chess fans. Lasting nearly a month, more than 200 participants are whittled down to a single winner through a series of knockout matches, starting with two games of classical chess, followed by rapid and blitz tiebreaks if necessary. Stakes are high, with a $2 million prize fund, and the top three finishers qualifying for the prestigious Candidates tournament (to be held in Cyprus in the spring), whose winner will challenge for the world championship.    The game below was an early highlight. The queen sacrifice is not new, and Harikrishna was probably aware that computer evaluations slightly favour the queen, but rightly trusted his own judgment.

The world’s top players prepare their openings in astonishing detail. Powerful chess computers, accessed via the cloud and thus available to everyone, make the process of analysis vastly more efficient than it used to be. Positions which once would have taken days to analyse ‘by hand’ can be explored exhaustively in an hour or two. Of course, that doesn’t mean they all pack up by lunchtime and adjourn to the beach. The paradox of technology applies in chess as in life: the workload multiplies to fill the time. The top players still work harder, on the whole, but they distinguish themselves not only with the depth of their knowledge, but also its breadth.

Magnus Carlsen headed the field at the Clutch Chess Champions Showdown, a quadrangular rapid tournament held at the St Louis Chess Club last month. The Norwegian, who became a father in September, always seems motivated playing at fast time limits and his opposition in St Louis was of the highest calibre – Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura and Gukesh Dommaraju. At the Norway Chess tournament in June, Gukesh, the 19-year-old reigning world champion, caused Carlsen to bang the table in frustration after turning around a hopeless position. But in St Louis, Gukesh salvaged just one draw from six games against Carlsen. Combined with 3.5-2.

Tributes have poured in for Daniel Naroditsky, the American grandmaster who has died suddenly at the age of 29. Those who knew him best told of his kindness and humility. He once noted that his favourite saying about chess was this: ‘At the end of the game, both the king and the pawn go into the same box.’ That ethos made Naroditsky one of the game’s most popular commentators, with over half a million followers on YouTube.     ‘Danya’ was both a precocious student and a gifted teacher. He published his first chess book (Mastering Positional Chess) when he was just 14 and went on to study history at Stanford. His online content, far more than most, was consistently edifying, and always delivered with a sense of humour and his trademark eloquence.

I felt a flush of optimism as England began our final game at the European Team Championships, held in Batumi earlier in October. The previous evening, my teammate Gawain Maroroa Jones had escaped with a draw in a marathon six-hour game, tying the match against a strong Dutch team. That left us paired against the leading team, Ukraine, in the final round. On paper it was an even match, but Ukraine had suffered a setback against Azerbaijan in the previous round, so we had realistic hopes of a podium finish – and even a theoretical chance of gold if the stars aligned.     I knew not to underestimate my 16-year-old opponent, Ihor Samunenkov, who was unbeaten in the tournament so far. The attractive finish to his first round game appears below.

Thirty years have passed since the 1995 world championship match at the World Trade Center in which Garry Kasparov defeated his challenger Viswanathan Anand 10.5-7.5. Anand went on to become the undisputed world champion in 2007, and defeated Kramnik, Topalov and Gelfand in match play, before losing the title to Carlsen in 2013. ‘Clutch Chess: The Legends’ this month was a nostalgic showcase for these two greats, who played an exhibition match at the St Louis Chess Club. The format was a dozen rapid and blitz games of Chess960, where the pieces are shuffled on the back rank before the game begins. Many considered Anand to be the clear favourite.

The momentum augured badly for Fabiano Caruana in the final match of the Grand Chess Tour, held in Sao Paulo earlier this month. In the first classical game against Maxime Vachier-Lagrave he blew a chance to take a commanding lead in the match, since wins in those slow games were weighted more than the subsequent rapid and blitz games (3:2:1 respectively). Worse still, he went on to lose one of the rapid games, leaving him needing a 3-1 victory in the blitz just to tie the match. Caruana explained after the match how he managed to keep his hopes alive. ‘If you think about it as having to win one game, and then it looks like you just lost one game in blitz, then that’s not too bad.’ One foot in front of the other, as they say.

The boy they call the ‘Messi of Chess’ achieved a milestone result at the ‘Legends and Prodigies’ tournament, held in Madrid last month. Eleven-year-old Faustino Oro, from Argentina, won the tournament with 7.5/9, thereby achieving his first grandmaster-level performance. The requirement is for three such results before the title is awarded. But in Madrid he cleared the bar with room to spare, and becomes the youngest player ever to achieve an international rating above the symbolic 2500 level, approximately grandmaster standard. Since 2021, the youngest player to qualify was Abhimanyu Mishra, at 12 years and four months.    Energetic middlegame play against a young Spanish master set the scene for an elegant finish.

‘When you play professional chess… you have to always believe in miracles. Especially if you are a player like me who’s not really good.’ A couple of rounds before the end of the Fide Grand Swiss, held in Samarkand in early September, Anish Giri gave a typically modest assessment of his chances of taking one of the coveted top two spots. Those qualify players for the 2026 Candidates’ tournament, whose winner earns the right to challenge for the world championship. By any normal standards, Giri is really good – an absolute top player for more than a decade who peaked at no. 3 in the world. But the Grand Swiss is an elite brawl, where he began as the seventh seed. Even for Giri, a top two finish is a tall order.

Halfway through the Fide Grand Swiss, held in Samarkand earlier in September, Magnus Carlsen picked out 14-year-old Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus as the player who had impressed him the most. The Turkish teenager, a grandmaster since last year and already established in the world’s top 100, looked utterly undaunted by the elite opposition he faced there.     In the second round, under pressure against the world champion, Dommaraju Gukesh, he came under pressure in the endgame but stirred up enough complications to save the game. The diagram shows the critical moment, after 39…Kd7-c6.

Here we go again! By the end of this year, eight players will have qualified for the 2026 Candidates’ Tournament, whose winner earns the right to challenge Gukesh Dommaraju for the World Championship title. One player, Fabiano Caruana, is qualified already, thanks to strong results in 2024. Fide, the international federation, also holds two major qualifying events: the Grand Swiss, currently underway in Samarkand, and the World Cup, to be held in Goa in November. Altogether, seven out of eight qualifying spots are awarded based on tournament results. The final spot will be awarded to the highest-rated player who doesn’t otherwise qualify. In theory, that would be Magnus Carlsen, but the former world champion, who abdicated in 2022, has shown no interest in regaining the title.

Patience is the companion of wisdom, declared St Augustine. That wisdom was manifest in Wesley So’s victory at the Sinquefield Cup last month, one of the strongest classical events in the calendar, with a $350,000 prize fund. So grabbed his first win as late as round seven, against world champion Gukesh; going into the last round he trailed the leaders by half a point. The outstanding feature of his final-round win was the farsighted decision to evacuate his king before launching the final assault. That victory put him into a playoff with Caruana and Praggnanandhaa. So said that he joked about sharing the title, with a nod to the 2024 World Blitz Championship where Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi did the same. When the arbiter refused, he went and won it anyway.