Luke McShane

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.