In the Age of COVID chess has been reinvented. In March (I think it was) the Candidates Tournament was dramatically ended a few rounds in and everyone wondered "what next". Enter Magnus Carlsen entrepreneur. With his star power, he has been getting himself a piece of the actio...

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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...

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https://youtu.be/LHrvQ7qaadE If you're a chess player who's touched with the human weakness of impatience or just liked to be engaged and see things develop – as we almost all do on our smartphones, checking our emails over 100 times a day – it's hard not to be drawn to speed...

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https://youtu.be/tXlM99xPQC8 Well there's been a frisson of excitement in the chess and AI world lately with the extraordinary performance of AlphaZero – essentially the computer that mastered the game Go – a game which proved, despite the relative simplicity of its rules, a m...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuehyRf88ac If you've got a bit of an appreciation of chess, this is a lot of fun. I've been watching it on and off today giving myself a little sugar hit by watching a game to take a break from doing other work. This is normally more a pro than...

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Both of the players of this game are pretty good. In the illustrated position it's black's move. Black won the game, but only because white managed to resign in a won position. You can see the game here .

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Black to play Stefansson vs Carlsen 21. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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After a very gruelling 11 rounds of classical chess which produced nine draws and one win for either side, Magnus Carlsen surprised most people by not trying very hard for a win in his final 'classical' game with challenger Sergey Karjakin. He was biding his time for the playo...

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Black to play N Batsiashvili vs N Zhukova 22. ...? See game for solution. This may be a two star puzzle, but I couldn't get it out. Can you? Click through to the game for the answer.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf6z5gkv3Ls Anton Smirnov, who turned 15 this year even if he looks a fair bit younger than that, has been playing in the Australian team in the Chess Olympiad. He's been playing at a rating strength of 2710 which places him 37th in the world gi...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=56&v=ELmoNHljCKk Australian Chess Grandmaster and one time Treasury economist David Smerdon is at the Chess Olympiad in Baku and managed to get Magnus Carlsen into a fair bit of trouble, before settling for an easy draw. Here's the g...

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https://youtu.be/n3AeM3Q9mU4 On a difficult subject, let's throw the conversation over to some people who know nothing about it, but who have flawless makeup on and vigorously assert mutually inconsistent propositions. If you think the first 90% of the video is exemplary, wait...

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https://youtu.be/lGn8ZLMU1-Q Something that’s fun for chess patzers like me is watching really good players play blitz and seeing how much further their chess intuition goes. This is normally savoured at live tournaments but I just discovered Banter Blitz which pits grandmaste...

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http://youtu.be/vmHPUtHlIXU Funny how, even though you've developed the mental skill and discipline to be the World Chess Champion, you can make a simple mistake. But what's much more intriguing is how, once you've actually made the mistake, you immediately know you've made it...

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Black to play Shabalov vs Aronian 21. ...? See game for solution.

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Busy Troppovians have no-one other than Troppo to let them know when something serious has happened in the chess world. If Troppo had been going at the time, Troppovians would have been the first non-chess aficionados in the world to hear of Bobby Fischer's extraordinary explo...

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I recall seeing an exciting young player from Canberra at a Doberl Cup about seven or eight years ago. (The Doberl Cup is a regular fixture of the Canberra calendar. The comp was endowed by Mr Doberl with enough money so that the best from Australia and a few additional grandm...

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From Chessbase where you can play the game https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EY27lgnPKWI In the above video we see a bullet game, played in Kragerø (Norway), between Magnus Carlsen and his second Laurent Fressinet. It was posted on August 6 2013 on Magnus...

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http://youtu.be/84NwnSltHFo

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Black to play M Ortueta vs J Sanz 31. ...? See game for solution. If you can't see the move - click through to the game and see how many things had to work out for the tricks to be worth playing.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_8WbDD2mmkw Rating: 2872. Closest behind, Garry Kasparov on 2851. Table of highest rated players ever, with date their best ratings were first achieve d Rank Rating Player Year-month 1 2872 Magnus Carlsen 2013-02 2 2851 Ga...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="630"] OK, so this is José Raúl Capablanca v Alexander Alekhine a few years later, but that's blogging for you - no fact checkers, no pay, no responsibility. Not like the MSM[/caption] This is perhaps the most storied chess game in hist...

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I am no bearded Dumbledore, but it was impossible not to see Magnus as a type of Harry Potter, a super-talent destined to become one the greatest and to leave a deep mark (a lightning bolt?) on our ancient game. Gary Kasparov Well folks, this just wouldn't be Troppo if I didn'...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="284"] White to play and win: Click on the image to play the game.[/caption] Meanwhile, in case you're interested, the Candidates matches have begun. We are two rounds in with the four strongest players in the world in an eight man (yes,...

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The platform this is from has an 'embed' function but Wordpress has it's own, which, unless you're as clever as Jacques means you can't embed anything other than those sites they have programmed for. In any event you can click here .

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Click on the player's names to play the game to yourself and find out the solution. White to play F J Sanchez Guirado vs Ponomariov 21. ? See game for solution.

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Every now and again, someone resigns in a position in which someone figures out a cute way to draw. Bobby Fischer may have resigned in his first (played) game in his famous match with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. But a few years later in Reykjavik Jaukur Angantysson who had a r...

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White to play D Tomic vs F Winzbeck 44. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles Still, perhaps not so tricky if you're used to solving these puzzles.

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Right now, for those that are interested, there's a Big Chess Tournament on. The Tal Memorial (which you can follow as the games are played here ) in which ten of the top fifteen players in the world are competing, including three rated over 2,800. Luke McShane is the only one...

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Well folks, the World Chess Title is being decided right now. I didn't want to bug you as the players played the first twelve games - each taking several hours. The score after those games is 6 Anand (Reigning world champion) and 6 Gefland (Challenger). It hasn't been the best...

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http://youtu.be/9fXuREZu_BQ Well humans are still competitive - for now.

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White to play Vidmar vs Euwe 34. ? See game for solution. As Troppodillians know my definition of an immortal game is one that involves some serious sacrificing and that the only pieces of the winners side that are left on the board have a role in the final checkmate. Click th...

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White to play Zimmermann vs Huebner 18. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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In which the queen is sacrificed and all the remaining pieces are involved in the resulting mate. Here.

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White to play A H Wohl vs Gipslis 23. ? See game for solution. Just solve this puzzle. And here's another really amazing game .

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The Candidates is on! The Candidates is a tournament of the highest ranking chess players in the world (other than the world champion) and the prize is the right to challenge the champ in this case Vishy Anand. The guy on the left right is Aronian who's expected to win. And th...

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Keynes famously said that the hardest part of coming up with the General Theory was not coming up with the new ideas so much as escaping from the old ones. I've just run into a great article on the implications of happiness research for making policy (and yes there are implica...

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Just so you know, this time of year sees one of the most fun chess competitions on the calendar - that is if you don't think a fun chess competition is a contradiction in terms. The Amber Tournament pits the very top echelon of chessdom against each other with each round invol...

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From Three Quarks The perils of writing about Ramanujan, as I did in my last 3QD column , is that there will always be those who insist that a better educated Ramanujan would have been a worse mathematician. One response is to say that by the same token a worse educated Euler...

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White to play G Grigore vs Holzke 25. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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Kasparov on Fischer in the NYRB. It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the USChampionship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that poi...

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White to play B Kovanova vs N Pogonina 22. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles But you can look up the game, and the computer analysis on chessbomb if you're curious.

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Computers are very clever beasties - at least most of the time. Sadly their matches against each other are deadly dull. The games virtually never have strong strategic lines of thinking - which is the main thing that makes chess absorbing (for me anyway - a battle is waged: a...

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Kasparov v Anand 1990. No prizes for guessing who won. And while I'm about it, here's how to get yourself into the mother of all zugswangs.

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Well folks, some of you may not be chess fiends. But tonight and for the next two nights even you may be intrigued to pop in and watch world championship blitz tourney. Players have 3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move each. So they've got to get a wriggle on. And they are stupen...

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Black to play C Lolli vs D Ercole Del Rio 18. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles OK, so it's not hard to work out the answer, but it's cute, and it happened in Modena in 1755. Before Adam Smith finished The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 there was, obviously eno...

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Who is this man? And why should you care? He is a Portuguese physicist, Filipe Maia, a PhD student at Janos Hajdu Molecular Biophysics group at Uppsala University and he's designed the best chess rating system the world has ever seen. Who knew he had it in him? Maybe him. Almo...

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As you've never seen them seriously - here .

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Elo ratings involve a system whereby your 'rating' is a function of who you beat or lose to and their rating. The 'future of the species' business is a reference to the fact that this manoeuvre of bootstrapping meaning from the record has become more important to the world rec...

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White to play A Volokitin vs Rublevsky 16. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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Magnus Carlsen, 2813 Wang Yue, 2752 Boris Gelfand, 2741 Teimour Radjabov, 2740 Ruslan Ponomariov, 2733 Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, 2672 Yes folks, he's on the rampage again. And this time there's a new toy - which has probably been available for quite some time, but it's the first...

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Yes folks. I've mentioned this before on Troppo. Having read of this bout , I can see how it could be quite exciting. Strange business. Play through the game here and the commentary has a little spice to it - as the two players get up from the board and try to beat each other...

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White to play Smyslov vs Oll 29. ? See game for solution. And this is a cute game too.

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Troppodillians will want to know - OK, some will want to know that the chess world championship is currently underway. Topalov, swashbuckling, highly strung, nasty piece of work is challenger to Anand who is a calmer, probably nicer and a tad more consistent player - and the W...

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White to play Carlsen vs J Smeets 33. ? See game for solution. From the Amberchess blindfold comp. I couldn't work it out - and I could see! And a nice little immortal game by Kasparov here .

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SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ? Magnus Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise. If you enjoy a bit of chess, Amberchess could be your kind of tourney. All games are over in about an hour and each day two games...

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Two apparently unrelated articles by superstars of the 1980s and 90s in their respective fields which share a common theme - the market's aversion to serious innovation, it's tendency to move incrementally towards lower levels of innovation leaving really fundamental and specu...

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Bobby Cheng is pretty good on the Melbourne primary schools under 12 chess circuit. In fact he's pretty good on the Melbourne under 14, under 16 and a few other circuits. With a rating of 2,200 not far from international mastership he went off to the world championships in Tur...

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Magnus Carlsen is not only now the highest rated player in the world, but like a lot of chess geniuses seems to be a cut above the others when it comes to lightning. Have a look at him taking apart a couple of super-grandmasters. If you enjoy chess, it's fun to watch him slowl...

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His last five games - to win four and a half games out of five against super-grandmasters rated over 2,700, including beating the World No. 1 Topalov a queen down (OK that last bit wasn't true) is playing at a rating strength of 3143. A very amazing little 18 year old. Have a...

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White to play Imbaud vs Strumilo 9. ? See game for solution.

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White to play Schlechter vs Meitner 25. ? See game for solution.

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James Morris is 15 years old, and he's bloody good at chess. He's just become an International Master . He's so much better than me, it's sad (for me that is.) But from all us patzers, congratulations James. I love it when people do something amazing! Should be encouraged!

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I've got to say I wasn't expecting Ivanchuk's next move . But then I'm not Ivanchuk.

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[caption id="attachment_8804" align="alignleft" width="417" caption="Like Fred Reinfeld says, White's next move is "one of the most beautiful ever played on the chess-board.""] Click diagram to see the game[/caption]

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A perfectly good player. Meets grandmaster rated opponent. Things end happily, for everyone except the perfectly good player. A very nice combination. White to play S Zagrebelny vs A Ponyi 16. ? See game for solution.

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White to play J Klinger vs Blatny 36. ? See game for solution. I really don't want to turn this into a chess blog. So this is overdoing it a bit. Then again, I've been surprised at the number of people I encounter who enjoy these posts, so I won't feel too bad. Anyway I enjoye...

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Famous for his swashbuckling attacks, Mikhail Tal was one of the most talented players never to really hold down the world championship. He won it and held it for just a year or so in 1960. From Wikipedia I learned this: In 1960, at the age of 23, Tal thoroughly defeated the r...

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By which I mean, one in which amazing, deep moves are made, and after a flurry of sacrifices, the king is slain, with each of its opponents' remaining pieces playing a role in dropping the final curtain. For those of you who care for such things, Enjoy!

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With black to move, the threat of white capturing the f7 pawn in this position makes for an inevtiably wild ride. Even Fischer has lost as white in a good looking position. But I've never seen anything like this madness. The guys who fight this game out seem to have form. Here...

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The finish of this game is pretty cool. I would in fact go so far as to call it tres cool . Indeed, Adoph Andersson won plaudits in the nineteenth century infancy of the modern game of chess for his 'immortal game' against Lionel Adalbert Bagration Felix Kieseritsky(!) in whic...

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Black to play A Yurgis vs Botvinnik 34. ...? See game for solution. about our puzzles

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Black to play L De Veauce vs Keene 6. ...? See game for solution. A seven move game. Not hard to see the answer, but kind of humorous nevertheless, especially given that this was a near grandmaster standard game.

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