Chess

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.

Magnus Carlsen slammed the table with such force that the pieces jumped from the board. Immediately, he resigned his game against teenage world champion Gukesh Dommaraju, who thereby achieved his first victory in a classical (slow) game against the world no 1. His comment on Carlsen’s pique was typically gracious: ‘I’ve also banged a lot of tables in my career.’ It was surely the manner of the loss which exasperated Carlsen. The Norwegian had reached a winning position with plenty of time on the clock, but missed opportunities to convert. Gukesh clung on until they reached the position below, when Carlsen, with less than a minute left, made a critical miscalculation: Gukesh Dommaraju – Magnus Carlsen Norway Chess 2025 52... Ne2+?? 52...Re8!

The final weekend of the Four Nations Chess League (4NCL) took place on the early May bank holiday, and promised a close race between the defending champions Wood Green and the strong Manx Liberty team, who began the weekend a couple of match points in front. The league looked likely to be decided in a final round pairing between the two.     It was an underdog team, The Sharks, which played the role of kingmaker. They began by holding the Manx team to a draw, enabling Wood Green to narrow the gap in the title race. But in the next (penultimate) round, The Sharks faced Wood Green, who fielded England heavyweight Michael Adams on top board (whose win is shown below). Despite that, the Sharks scored a 4.5-3.5 upset.

Anyone who plays chess will know the feeling of reaching a winning position, only to screw it up and to lose the game instead. So far so normal, and the cliché about ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’ can apply to any sport. But chess offers a far more piquant anguish, unavailable in most other endeavours. Even among chess players, only a tiny minority will experience it. Directly resigning in a winning position – that is the stuff of nightmares. It sounds ridiculous – why would you ever do that? All it takes is to overlook one crucial resource, and it happened last week to one of the best in the world.     The diagram position below is taken from an online game played in the Champions Chess Tour.

A ‘Fair Play violation’ got the YouTube streamer DrLupo booted out of the most recent series of PogChamps, Chess.com’s online invitational tournament for streamers and athletes, which has a $100,000 prize fund. DrLupo’s transgression was not particularly subtle. In elementary fashion, he blundered his queen for two minor pieces at move 11, only to comprehensively outplay his opponent, WolfeyVGC, who outrated him by more than 700 points on the platform. At first, DrLupo didn’t make things any better by trying to pass it off as an accident. Internet streamers often have a chat window open while they are playing, and inevitably fans will sometimes suggest moves while the games are being played. But DrLupo had not just made one or two unusually good moves.

The other day, a top computer chess engine demolished the world no. 2 Hikaru Nakamura in a series of online blitz games by a 14-2 margin. Nothing unusual in that; computers have played at superhuman levels for decades now, to the point where scoring two points out of 16 counts as an achievement. But those games were also played with knight odds for Nakamura! His opponent, an online chess-playing bot named ‘LeelaKnightOdds’, has been specially tuned to play with a knight missing from the start position. It was adapted from ‘Leela Chess Zero’ (aka LCZero), an open source project based on the ideas behind the AlphaZero engine described in papers by Google DeepMind in 2017.

Vasyl Ivanchuk was at the centre of a heart-rending scene during the tenth round of the World Blitz Championship in New York in December. The former world no. 2 could certainly have won his dramatic game against Daniel Naroditsky, but he lost on time after his nerves let him down at the critical moment. Overcome by emotion, Ivanchuk broke down and sobbed at the board. The Ukrainian grandmaster is a true chess obsessive, loved by fans for his disarming eccentricity as well as his brilliant play. At 56, he had recently dropped out of the world’s top 100 players, but his passion for chess and creative spark appear undiminished.

Magnus Carlsen’s run of nine straight wins at the Grenke Freestyle Open was, even by his own standards, extraordinary. The world no. 1 is a zealous advocate for freestyle chess, in which the pieces on the first rank are placed in one of 960 possible configurations at the start of the game. The format has been tested in a series of elite events, but the Grenke Open – held in Karlsruhe over the Easter weekend – was one of very few freestyle events open to players of all levels. Based on the standard of Carlsen’s opposition (which included seven grandmasters), he would have expected to score 7/9 in normal chess (perhaps five wins and four draws). But the uncharted format makes it hard to compare his 9/9 score with historical precedents.

Women’s world champion Ju Wenjun has scored a convincing 6.5-2.5 victory over her challenger Tan Zhongyi in the Women’s World Championship match, held in China earlier this month. Tan took an early lead by grinding out a minuscule advantage in the second game, but Ju levelled the scores with an equally patient win in the next. She then took the lead in the fifth game, and never looked back. That was the first of four consecutive wins for Ju, where she repeatedly outclassed the challenger in her handling of technical positions. Her margin of victory was surprising, since the two should have been very closely matched, according to their international ratings.

Good, but why now? Did they only just notice? Those were my thoughts when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. I’m similarly pleased and bemused by the new BBC series Chess Masters: The Endgame. I recall evenings after school more than 30 years ago, watching the Kasparov-Short world championship match in London on TV. So hurrah for a new prime-time scheduling slot! But millions of people play chess. Did we really have to wait this long? The real issue must be that finding a format to make chess look good on TV is hard. Partly that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; with so few attempts, it’s impossible to learn what works. Do you want to inform, educate, or entertain?

I like tournaments which award prizes for the best game, offering a welcome reminder that there is more to chess than points on the scoreboard. Naturally, who wins those is a subjective matter, and even what you call the award is up for debate. Should it be a ‘best game’ prize, in the sense of high-quality play with few mistakes? A brilliancy prize for a quick attack? Perhaps a beauty prize, for the game’s visual impact? At the end of the Fide Women’s Grand Prix held in Monaco in February, a beauty prize was awarded for the game below.

Almost 400 players, including more than 100 grandmasters, travelled to the European Individual Championships last month in Eforie Nord, a small Romanian town on the coast of the Black Sea. Dozens of players have a realistic shot at winning this fiercely competitive event, which in recent years was won by players seeded 33rd, 11th, 20th and 33rd. So it was remarkable that the German grandmaster Matthias Blübaum managed to win it for the second time in his career (after 2022, in Slovenia). He shared first place with two other players on 8.5/11, and won the title on tiebreak. Third placed Maxim Rodshtein from Israel won a thrilling game against the veteran elite grandmaster Vasyl Ivanchuk from Ukraine.

The best of Aesop’s fables is the one in which the Wind and the Sun compete to remove the coat from a passing man. The Wind goes first, assaulting the man with full force, but the harder it blows, the tighter the man grips his coat. When the Sun takes a turn, it radiates such glorious heat that the man takes off the coat of his own accord. Similar wisdom might inform an interview with a sporting figure. Forget the Paxmanesque inquisition: prepare some open-ended questions, establish a rapport and listen carefully to the responses. You would probably not strap your subject to a polygraph machine, point a camera at them and pepper them with questions like ‘Have you ever played chess while you were drunk?

The vast majority of winning blows in chess are delivered by a piece moving forwards. Powerful retreating moves are rare, but the very fact of going against the grain makes an aesthetic impact. Played for purely strategic reasons, such moves are all the more admirable, so I was duly impressed by a move played in the Varsity Match earlier this month. Ashvin Sivakumar, representing Oxford, holds the advantage, with pressure in the centre and the kingside, but it’s not obvious how to move forward. There’s the rub! By retreating his bishop from e3 to c1, he reroutes it to b2 to bear down on the kingside from afar – a fact which proves decisive a few moves later. Ashvin Sivakumar (Oxford) – Cameron Goh (Cambridge) Varsity Chess Match, March 2025 27 Bc1!