Chess

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.

In one sense, everything went right for Nodirbek Yakubboev at the Rubinstein Memorial, held in Poland earlier this month. The 23-year-old grandmaster, who was part of Uzbekistan’s gold medal winning squad at the Chennai Olympiad in 2022, scored a convincing tournament victory with four wins and five draws and pushed into the world’s top 50. And yet, it could have been even better. In the penultimate round, Yakubboev conducted a sparkling attack, only to blow it at the crucial moment and let his opponent, Matthias Blübaum, escape with a draw. It began with an enviable flash of optimism in the diagram position. Older, wiser heads would surely just castle kingside, but Yakubboev advanced 14 h4, preparing Nf3-g5.

The life cycle of Drosophila melanogaster lasts a couple of weeks, so the humble fruit fly is far more useful than a giant tortoise to a geneticist with a hypothesis and a deadline. Similarly, for AI researchers, chess has long been a useful testbed because it has clear rules but unfathomable depth. And yet there is an incongruity. Compared with the breakneck development of computing, the game of chess remains reassuringly dependable, while the thing we see evolving in real time is AI itself. Not long after ChatGPT was first released, late in 2022, some people had fun making it play chess. Stockfish is the leanest, meanest chess engine there is, the apotheosis of decades of incremental improvement in one narrow niche.

The final round of the British Championships, held at the St George’s Hall in Liverpool, promised plenty of drama. Six players shared the lead, and knowing the butterflies that swarm before critical games, it was a safe bet that at least one of the top three boards would see a winner. Top seed Nikita Vitiugov, the former Russian champion who now represents England, faced Stuart Conquest, who won the championship in 2008. Vitiugov reacted poorly to Conquest’s provocative, offbeat opening (1 e4 Nc6!?) and landed in desperate trouble. Just when his chances seemed to be improving, he committed a howler.

They say chess is an art, a science and a sport. Now it’s an e-sport too. The Esports World Cup, held in Riyadh, is an annual international tournament for major computer games such as Dota 2, this year with $38 million in prizes across the 25 events. For the first time, chess took its place on the roster, and the $1.5 million prize pool drew most of the world’s elite. Magnus Carlsen represented Team Liquid, a professional e-sports organisation fielding competitors in various events. Two of his toughest opponents were Alireza Firouzja and Hikaru Nakamura, playing for the Saudi e-sports organisation Team Falcons. In many ways, this was the culmination of a trend which began with the Magnus Carlsen Chess Invitational, held online during the pandemic in 2020.

Michael Adams took first place in a strongly contested English Championship, held in Kenilworth in July. The veteran elite grandmaster defeated Nikita Vitiugov in a tense playoff, after the two tied for first place with five wins and two draws each. Vitiugov, a former Russian champion, now lives in the UK and has represented England since 2023. Adams won a crisp attacking game against 16-year-old Shreyas Royal, who already became a grandmaster last year. Michael Adams-Shreyas RoyalEnglish Championship, Kenilworth, July 2025 White to play, position after 29…g7-g6 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nf6 3 Nxe5 d6 4 Nf3 Nxe4 5 d4 d5 6 Bd3 Bf5 7 O-O Be7 8 Re1 O-O 9 Nbd2 Nd6 10 Nf1 c6 11 Bf4 Bxd3 12 Qxd3 Na6 13 Ng3 Nc7 14 h4!

Levon Aronian took the $200,000 first prize at the latest leg of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, held in Las Vegas earlier this month. The fifth event of the tour’s debut year, scheduled for Delhi in September, has been cancelled due to a lack of sponsors, but Carlsen tops the leaderboard ahead of the final, which remains scheduled for December in Cape Town. The game below was played in the semi-final, and had as a start position: Ra1, Nb1, Kc1, Nd1, Be1, Qf1, Rg1, Bh1. Black’s setup mirrors that: Ra8, Nb8, etc.

Before the SuperUnited Rapid & Blitz tournament, held in Zagreb earlier this month, Magnus Carlsen spoke frankly: ‘Gukesh hasn’t done anything to indicate he’s going to do well in such a tournament.’ That was, in a sense, true. Granted, 19-year old Gukesh Dommaraju has been world champion since December, when he defeated the reigning champion Ding Liren in Singapore. But that match was played in classical chess, the slowest form of the game. Rapid games usually last 30-60 minutes in total, and blitz games less than ten. Success at those faster time limits calls for a well-honed intuition, whereas classical games require more in the way of stamina and an intense attention to detail. Gukesh has focused his efforts almost exclusively on classical chess.

The team of young talents from Uzbekistan, who sensationally won gold at the Chennai Olympiad in 2022, continue to develop apace. The strongest, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, is in the world top 10, and Javokhir Sindarov is at no. 25. They tied for first at the strong UzChess Cup, held in Tashkent in June, competing against elite players like Ian Nepomniachtchi, Arjun Erigaisi and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa. The latter also tied for first and won the playoff, though he was on the losing side of the most spectacular game of the event (perhaps the most beautiful of the year so far). R. Praggnanandhaa-Richard RapportUzChess Masters 2025 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 f3 Bg7 4 e4 d6 5 Nc3 O-O 6 Nge2 a6 7 Be3 Nbd7 8 Qd2 b5 9 h4 Wisely declining the pawn sacrifice.

For a chess player, delivering a check to the king always feels like asking a question, as if to say, ‘What are you going to do about that?’ And I was instructed as a child: ‘Don’t answer a question with a question!’ So naturally, I get an impish thrill from those rare occasions where a check is met by a move which simultaneously delivers a check to the opponent. Such a counter-check could even be mate. That circumstance is vanishingly rare in practical play, but composers of chess problems have often toyed with the idea. One shining example is the position in the first diagram, a mate in three composed by Sam Loyd in 1903.

Right before the end of my game against Alexei Shirov at the World Rapid Team Championships earlier in June, I had the better side of a drawn position and a full 20 seconds to make a move. Not too bad: Shirov is a former member of the world elite, whose brilliant games I had revered since childhood, and a draw would secure us victory in the match. At that moment, my mind left the chessboard. It pondered the winning position I had earlier in the game. And it drifted back, yet again, to the middlegame, which reached the position in the diagram below, right after I, playing Black, had captured a knight on f5. In response to 23 Nxf5 I intended Qxb2!, when White must choose between 24 Rxg7+ and 24 Nxh6+, but in either case Black emerges from the skirmish with an extra knight.

It was a treat to see so many of the world’s top players in London for the World Rapid and Blitz Team Championships last week. Now in its third edition, the event has an unusual format, in which teams of six must include one female player and one rated below 2000 (roughly, a strong club player). That drew a sociable mix of teams, including traditional clubs, both from the UK and abroad, some national teams, and some teams with corporate sponsorship. My team, Malcolm’s Mates (Malcolm Pein is the federation’s international director), had a considerable overlap with the English national team, with additional strong players from abroad.