Luke McShane

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?

I like tournaments which award prizes for the best game, offering a welcome reminder that there is more to chess than points on the scoreboard. Naturally, who wins those is a subjective matter, and even what you call the award is up for debate. Should it be a ‘best game’ prize, in the sense of high-quality play with few mistakes? A brilliancy prize for a quick attack? Perhaps a beauty prize, for the game’s visual impact? At the end of the Fide Women’s Grand Prix held in Monaco in February, a beauty prize was awarded for the game below.

Almost 400 players, including more than 100 grandmasters, travelled to the European Individual Championships last month in Eforie Nord, a small Romanian town on the coast of the Black Sea. Dozens of players have a realistic shot at winning this fiercely competitive event, which in recent years was won by players seeded 33rd, 11th, 20th and 33rd. So it was remarkable that the German grandmaster Matthias Blübaum managed to win it for the second time in his career (after 2022, in Slovenia). He shared first place with two other players on 8.5/11, and won the title on tiebreak. Third placed Maxim Rodshtein from Israel won a thrilling game against the veteran elite grandmaster Vasyl Ivanchuk from Ukraine.

The best of Aesop’s fables is the one in which the Wind and the Sun compete to remove the coat from a passing man. The Wind goes first, assaulting the man with full force, but the harder it blows, the tighter the man grips his coat. When the Sun takes a turn, it radiates such glorious heat that the man takes off the coat of his own accord. Similar wisdom might inform an interview with a sporting figure. Forget the Paxmanesque inquisition: prepare some open-ended questions, establish a rapport and listen carefully to the responses. You would probably not strap your subject to a polygraph machine, point a camera at them and pepper them with questions like ‘Have you ever played chess while you were drunk?

The vast majority of winning blows in chess are delivered by a piece moving forwards. Powerful retreating moves are rare, but the very fact of going against the grain makes an aesthetic impact. Played for purely strategic reasons, such moves are all the more admirable, so I was duly impressed by a move played in the Varsity Match earlier this month. Ashvin Sivakumar, representing Oxford, holds the advantage, with pressure in the centre and the kingside, but it’s not obvious how to move forward. There’s the rub! By retreating his bishop from e3 to c1, he reroutes it to b2 to bear down on the kingside from afar – a fact which proves decisive a few moves later. Ashvin Sivakumar (Oxford) – Cameron Goh (Cambridge) Varsity Chess Match, March 2025 27 Bc1!

England’s over-65 team triumphed at the World Senior Team Championships, held in Prague last month. They began this event as second seeds behind the German team Lasker Schachstiftung, whose strongest player Artur Yusupov, originally from the Soviet Union, was once ranked third in the world. That crucial England-Germany match ended in a 2-2 tie, but England’s team of John Nunn, Glenn Flear, Tony Kosten, Peter Large and Terence Chapman scored more consistently against the rest of the field, helped by an outstanding 7/8 score for Peter Large. In the game below, his primitive threat to the f7-pawn at move seven bears a funny resemblance to Scholar’s mate, which arises after 1 e4 e5 2 Qh5 Nc6 3 Bc4 Nf6?? 4 Qxf7 mate.

Back in 2008, Boris Spassky paid a visit to Bobby Fischer’s grave in Iceland. ‘Do you think the spot next to him is available?’ he mused. Last week, Spassky died too, at the age of 88. The two world champions were rivals, but also the unlikeliest of friends. Spassky was born in Leningrad in 1937, and won recognition at the age of ten by beating the Soviet champion Mikhail Botvinnik in a simultaneous exhibition. By the age of 18, he had earned the grandmaster title and qualified for the Candidates tournament in Amsterdam, 1956. Ten years later, he played a world championship match against Tigran Petrosian, but lost narrowly: 12.5-11.5. Spassky, who is often described as having a ‘universal’ style, qualified for another match with Petrosian in 1969.

Forty minutes, two problems to solve. Earlier this month I was seated in an examination hall at Harrow school in London, taking part in the final of the Winton British Chess Solving Championship. This was the second solving challenge of the day: two ‘mate in 3’ problems. The first (see the puzzle below) was a beauty and I was delighted to crack it within ten minutes. So far so good, and I had half an hour left to tackle the second. That’s where I got stuck. For one thing, the irrational position (see diagram below) made me dizzy. Composed by Aleksandr Feoktistov in 1969, the task is for White to play and give mate in three moves or fewer.