Luke McShane is chess columnist for The Spectator.
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White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, The Musical World, 1858. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 26 January. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1… e3!! 2 Bxc6 e2 wins, e.g.
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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.
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Black to play. Trent-Hawkins, King’s Place Open, 2015. The bishop’s skewer looks set to cause heavy material losses. Hawkins next move showed that he can nevertheless win the game. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 19 January. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1… Nf3! wins, e.g. 2 gxf3 Qxf3+ 3 Kg1 Qg2#. White tried 2 Bg6 but soon lost: fxg6 3 Qxd5+ Qxd5 4 Nxd5 Bxg2+ etc.
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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].
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Black to play. Hakobyan-Erigaisi, Fide World Rapid Championship, Doha 2025. Erigaisi’s next move decided the game in his favour. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 12 January. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Rb7! Nxb7 2 h6! g6 3 Qf6 Kf8 4 h7 with mate to follow. Not 1 h6 f6! and Black survives.
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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.
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White to play. Theodorou-Dominguez, London Chess Classic Super Rapidplay, December 2025. Theodorou found a clever winning shot. Which move did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 5 January. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Nd4! g6 2 Qh3 Black resigned, e.g. 2…Rxd4 3 Rxf7 Bg7 4 Rxg7+ Kxg7 5 Bh6+ Kg8 6 Rf8 mate.
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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??
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Martirosyan-Yilmaz, European Individual Championship 2025. Black has just pushed his pawn to c4, overlooking a crucial tactic. Martirosyan’s next move decided the game. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 December. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 a8=N! Kg2 2 Nb6!
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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.
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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.
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White to play and mate in three moves (that is, W-B-W-B-W checkmate). Composed by Sam Loyd, Holyoke Transcript, 1876. Please note that because of the Christmas printing schedule, this is not a prize puzzle. Last week’s solution 1 Qf6+!
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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.
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White to play. A nice example from the ‘Generating Chess Puzzles’ paper mentioned above. Which move allows White to force checkmate on the kingside? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 1 December. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qg7+!
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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.
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Donchenko-Liem, Fide World Cup, Goa 2025. Donchenko’s next move forced a decisive material gain. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 24 November. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Bf7+!! After 1… Kxf7 2 fxe3 the queen was lost and White won. No better is 1…Qxf7 2 Qxe5+ or 1…Ke7 2 fxe3 Qd6 3 Rad1 etc.
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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.
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Wei Yi-Kacper Piorun, Fide World Cup, Goa 2025. Which surprising move enabled Wei to gain a decisive material advantage? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 17 November. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
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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.
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White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1858 Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 10 November. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1…Qd1!!