Luke McShane

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.

The team of young talents from Uzbekistan, who sensationally won gold at the Chennai Olympiad in 2022, continue to develop apace. The strongest, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, is in the world top 10, and Javokhir Sindarov is at no. 25. They tied for first at the strong UzChess Cup, held in Tashkent in June, competing against elite players like Ian Nepomniachtchi, Arjun Erigaisi and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa. The latter also tied for first and won the playoff, though he was on the losing side of the most spectacular game of the event (perhaps the most beautiful of the year so far). R. Praggnanandhaa-Richard RapportUzChess Masters 2025 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 f3 Bg7 4 e4 d6 5 Nc3 O-O 6 Nge2 a6 7 Be3 Nbd7 8 Qd2 b5 9 h4 Wisely declining the pawn sacrifice.

For a chess player, delivering a check to the king always feels like asking a question, as if to say, ‘What are you going to do about that?’ And I was instructed as a child: ‘Don’t answer a question with a question!’ So naturally, I get an impish thrill from those rare occasions where a check is met by a move which simultaneously delivers a check to the opponent. Such a counter-check could even be mate. That circumstance is vanishingly rare in practical play, but composers of chess problems have often toyed with the idea. One shining example is the position in the first diagram, a mate in three composed by Sam Loyd in 1903.

Right before the end of my game against Alexei Shirov at the World Rapid Team Championships earlier in June, I had the better side of a drawn position and a full 20 seconds to make a move. Not too bad: Shirov is a former member of the world elite, whose brilliant games I had revered since childhood, and a draw would secure us victory in the match. At that moment, my mind left the chessboard. It pondered the winning position I had earlier in the game. And it drifted back, yet again, to the middlegame, which reached the position in the diagram below, right after I, playing Black, had captured a knight on f5. In response to 23 Nxf5 I intended Qxb2!, when White must choose between 24 Rxg7+ and 24 Nxh6+, but in either case Black emerges from the skirmish with an extra knight.

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.