Luke McShane

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.     In the second round, under pressure against the world champion, Dommaraju Gukesh, he came under pressure in the endgame but stirred up enough complications to save the game. The diagram shows the critical moment, after 39…Kd7-c6.

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 qualifying events: the Grand Swiss, currently underway in Samarkand, and the World Cup, to be held in Goa in November. Altogether, seven out of eight qualifying spots are awarded based on tournament results. The final spot will be awarded to the highest-rated player who doesn’t otherwise qualify. In theory, that would be Magnus Carlsen, but the former world champion, who abdicated in 2022, has shown no interest in regaining the title.

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 round he trailed the leaders by half a point. The outstanding feature of his final-round win was the farsighted decision to evacuate his king before launching the final assault. That victory put him into a playoff with Caruana and Praggnanandhaa. So said that he joked about sharing the title, with a nod to the 2024 World Blitz Championship where Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi did the same. When the arbiter refused, he went and won it anyway.

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. And yet, it could have been even better. In the penultimate round, Yakubboev conducted a sparkling attack, only to blow it at the crucial moment and let his opponent, Matthias Blübaum, escape with a draw. It began with an enviable flash of optimism in the diagram position. Older, wiser heads would surely just castle kingside, but Yakubboev advanced 14 h4, preparing Nf3-g5.

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 is an incongruity. Compared with the breakneck development of computing, the game of chess remains reassuringly dependable, while the thing we see evolving in real time is AI itself. Not long after ChatGPT was first released, late in 2022, some people had fun making it play chess. Stockfish is the leanest, meanest chess engine there is, the apotheosis of decades of incremental improvement in one narrow niche.

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, the former Russian champion who now represents England, faced Stuart Conquest, who won the championship in 2008. Vitiugov reacted poorly to Conquest’s provocative, offbeat opening (1 e4 Nc6!?) and landed in desperate trouble. Just when his chances seemed to be improving, he committed a howler.

They say chess is an art, a science and a sport. Now it’s an e-sport too. The Esports World Cup, held in Riyadh, is an annual international tournament for major computer games such as Dota 2, this year with $38 million in prizes across the 25 events. For the first time, chess took its place on the roster, and the $1.5 million prize pool drew most of the world’s elite. Magnus Carlsen represented Team Liquid, a professional e-sports organisation fielding competitors in various events. Two of his toughest opponents were Alireza Firouzja and Hikaru Nakamura, playing for the Saudi e-sports organisation Team Falcons. In many ways, this was the culmination of a trend which began with the Magnus Carlsen Chess Invitational, held online during the pandemic in 2020.

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.