Luke McShane

It was a treat to see so many of the world’s top players in London for the World Rapid and Blitz Team Championships last week. Now in its third edition, the event has an unusual format, in which teams of six must include one female player and one rated below 2000 (roughly, a strong club player). That drew a sociable mix of teams, including traditional clubs, both from the UK and abroad, some national teams, and some teams with corporate sponsorship. My team, Malcolm’s Mates (Malcolm Pein is the federation’s international director), had a considerable overlap with the English national team, with additional strong players from abroad.

Magnus Carlsen slammed the table with such force that the pieces jumped from the board. Immediately, he resigned his game against teenage world champion Gukesh Dommaraju, who thereby achieved his first victory in a classical (slow) game against the world no 1. His comment on Carlsen’s pique was typically gracious: ‘I’ve also banged a lot of tables in my career.’ It was surely the manner of the loss which exasperated Carlsen. The Norwegian had reached a winning position with plenty of time on the clock, but missed opportunities to convert. Gukesh clung on until they reached the position below, when Carlsen, with less than a minute left, made a critical miscalculation: Gukesh Dommaraju – Magnus Carlsen Norway Chess 2025 52... Ne2+?? 52...Re8!

The final weekend of the Four Nations Chess League (4NCL) took place on the early May bank holiday, and promised a close race between the defending champions Wood Green and the strong Manx Liberty team, who began the weekend a couple of match points in front. The league looked likely to be decided in a final round pairing between the two.     It was an underdog team, The Sharks, which played the role of kingmaker. They began by holding the Manx team to a draw, enabling Wood Green to narrow the gap in the title race. But in the next (penultimate) round, The Sharks faced Wood Green, who fielded England heavyweight Michael Adams on top board (whose win is shown below). Despite that, the Sharks scored a 4.5-3.5 upset.

Anyone who plays chess will know the feeling of reaching a winning position, only to screw it up and to lose the game instead. So far so normal, and the cliché about ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’ can apply to any sport. But chess offers a far more piquant anguish, unavailable in most other endeavours. Even among chess players, only a tiny minority will experience it. Directly resigning in a winning position – that is the stuff of nightmares. It sounds ridiculous – why would you ever do that? All it takes is to overlook one crucial resource, and it happened last week to one of the best in the world.     The diagram position below is taken from an online game played in the Champions Chess Tour.

A ‘Fair Play violation’ got the YouTube streamer DrLupo booted out of the most recent series of PogChamps, Chess.com’s online invitational tournament for streamers and athletes, which has a $100,000 prize fund. DrLupo’s transgression was not particularly subtle. In elementary fashion, he blundered his queen for two minor pieces at move 11, only to comprehensively outplay his opponent, WolfeyVGC, who outrated him by more than 700 points on the platform. At first, DrLupo didn’t make things any better by trying to pass it off as an accident. Internet streamers often have a chat window open while they are playing, and inevitably fans will sometimes suggest moves while the games are being played. But DrLupo had not just made one or two unusually good moves.

The other day, a top computer chess engine demolished the world no. 2 Hikaru Nakamura in a series of online blitz games by a 14-2 margin. Nothing unusual in that; computers have played at superhuman levels for decades now, to the point where scoring two points out of 16 counts as an achievement. But those games were also played with knight odds for Nakamura! His opponent, an online chess-playing bot named ‘LeelaKnightOdds’, has been specially tuned to play with a knight missing from the start position. It was adapted from ‘Leela Chess Zero’ (aka LCZero), an open source project based on the ideas behind the AlphaZero engine described in papers by Google DeepMind in 2017.

Vasyl Ivanchuk was at the centre of a heart-rending scene during the tenth round of the World Blitz Championship in New York in December. The former world no. 2 could certainly have won his dramatic game against Daniel Naroditsky, but he lost on time after his nerves let him down at the critical moment. Overcome by emotion, Ivanchuk broke down and sobbed at the board. The Ukrainian grandmaster is a true chess obsessive, loved by fans for his disarming eccentricity as well as his brilliant play. At 56, he had recently dropped out of the world’s top 100 players, but his passion for chess and creative spark appear undiminished.

Magnus Carlsen’s run of nine straight wins at the Grenke Freestyle Open was, even by his own standards, extraordinary. The world no. 1 is a zealous advocate for freestyle chess, in which the pieces on the first rank are placed in one of 960 possible configurations at the start of the game. The format has been tested in a series of elite events, but the Grenke Open – held in Karlsruhe over the Easter weekend – was one of very few freestyle events open to players of all levels. Based on the standard of Carlsen’s opposition (which included seven grandmasters), he would have expected to score 7/9 in normal chess (perhaps five wins and four draws). But the uncharted format makes it hard to compare his 9/9 score with historical precedents.

Women’s world champion Ju Wenjun has scored a convincing 6.5-2.5 victory over her challenger Tan Zhongyi in the Women’s World Championship match, held in China earlier this month. Tan took an early lead by grinding out a minuscule advantage in the second game, but Ju levelled the scores with an equally patient win in the next. She then took the lead in the fifth game, and never looked back. That was the first of four consecutive wins for Ju, where she repeatedly outclassed the challenger in her handling of technical positions. Her margin of victory was surprising, since the two should have been very closely matched, according to their international ratings.

Good, but why now? Did they only just notice? Those were my thoughts when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. I’m similarly pleased and bemused by the new BBC series Chess Masters: The Endgame. I recall evenings after school more than 30 years ago, watching the Kasparov-Short world championship match in London on TV. So hurrah for a new prime-time scheduling slot! But millions of people play chess. Did we really have to wait this long? The real issue must be that finding a format to make chess look good on TV is hard. Partly that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; with so few attempts, it’s impossible to learn what works. Do you want to inform, educate, or entertain?