Luke McShane

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 of the game, has given a huge boost to the popularity of this variant. His 9/9 winning score last year was astonishing even by Carlsen’s standards, but this time he had to settle for shared third place on 7/9, alongside other elite players including Nepomniachtchi and Abdusattorov. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Germany’s top player Vincent Keymer both finished ahead on 7.5/9, with the latter taking the title on tiebreak.

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 the world championship title. Hikaru Nakamura, one of the pre-tournament favourites, is all but out of the race after starting with just 2.5/7. Against Sindarov, he chose an ambitious sacrifice of two pawns in the opening, reaching a situation where the bishop pair – especially the one on d6 – are known to offer good long-term prospects. But the position remains double-edged, and after a dozen quick-fire moves, Sindarov had just played 12...

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, selfmates and studies (e.g. ‘White to play and win’). Helpmates can be particularly confusing for the uninitiated, because unlike vanilla chess where the play is adversarial, a helpmate is a display of choreography, where the sides cooperate to bring about mate as briskly as possible.

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 his games and led the field by 1.5 points, including a neat finish in the game below.    White should win this endgame, but Czopor’s last move, 79…Rb7-a7, left his rooks vulnerable and hastened the end. The queen now begins a nimble dance, with the ultimate aim of forking the king and the rook on b6. Gawain Maroroa Jones-Maciej Czopor British Rapidplay Championship, March 2026 80 Qf5+!

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.    An attack is always harder to handle when there is more than one plausible continuation. Rushbrooke’s last move, 27 g4-g5 creates a dangerous threat of 28 gxf6 gxf6 29 Qh4! Qe7 30 Bxe5! Bxe5 31 Rxa2, winning material. By contrast, 28 g6 is less dangerous, in view of 28…Bxc4! (since the b3 pawn is pinned) 29 Qh4 Bg8! 30 gxf7 Bxb3 and the king is secure on h8.

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, all the more glaring. Meanwhile, the teenage world champion Dommaraju Gukesh has struggled since winning the world title late in 2024. In Prague he lost three games and finished joint last, leaving him 15th in the live ratings.     Prague itself was an unusually combative event. The line-up was strong without being exclusively drawn from the world’s top 20, and that broader range seemed to foster a fighting spirit in everyone.

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 ever changes very much. There is a kernel of truth in this, as a few elite events do become turgid drawfests, but the broader claim is nonsense: there is no closed shop. Most top players also face ‘rank-and-file’ grandmasters regularly, in national leagues, international team events, and the occasional large open tournament.

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 lifestyle that the life of a professional chess player readily affords — itinerant, living off one’s wits and unburdened by the tyranny of early mornings. In his best games collection, Timman’s Triumphs (New In Chess, 2020) he recounts attempting a more ascetic approach in the lead-up to the 1971 IBM tournament in Amsterdam, striving to begin the event in optimal form.

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 first Fide Freestyle World Championship. Later this year, the ‘Total Chess’ World Championship pilot arrives – a combined fast-classical, rapid, and blitz format developed with Norway Chess, the prestigious Norwegian tournament organisation, that will crown a single ‘combined’ world champion across all three disciplines. Both initiatives seem designed to keep Carlsen within Fide’s orbit.

‘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 puzzles over the years, but he had a point. He was talking about the position below, in which he had just played 33…Kf8-g7. His opponent, David Anton Guijarro is Spain’s strongest grandmaster, and if the position were presented to him as a puzzle, he would certainly spot the strongest move in a couple of seconds. White can win with 34 Qxe5+!! with a beautiful finish after 34…dxe5 35 R1xf7+ Kh8 36 Rh7+ Rxh7 37 Rxh7 mate.