Luke McShane

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 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

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

‘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

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. 

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

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

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.

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

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,