LONDON — The tension continues to mount as Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana remain deadlocked after eight games of their 12-game World Chess Championship match in London. The middle portion of the match saw the continuation and evolution of the players’ fascinating psychological duel, a supercomputer-generated…
LONDON — It’s all square in the 2018 World Chess Championship, as reigning champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana shared the chocolates in each of the first four games of their 12-game match in London. It’s been an amazing start, featuring two classic games and two more tense encounters, incredible…
After four games, reigning chess world champion Magnus Carlsen and his American challenger Fabiano Caruana are deadlocked at two points each. Each of the four games they’ve played has ended in a tie, and today’s draw was the shortest (and most boring) of the bunch, as it only took two-and-a-half hours and 34 moves.…
Actor Woody Harrelson was in London for today’s start of the World Chess Championship between grandmasters Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana. Harrelson thought he’d lighten up the tense 12-game match with a little joke during the first move ceremony—chess’s version of a first pitch or puck drop, basically. Instead,…
It’s a phenomenal time to be a chess fan. We can follow live action from thousands of games all around the world on our phones, from elite super-tournaments to the smallest club competitions. Freely available learning and training resources by far supersede anything the famed Soviet system could ever have offered. The…
Fabiano Caruana is the No. 2-ranked chess player in the world. He achieved Grandmaster status just before his 15th birthday back in 2007. In the 2016 Chess Olympiad he represented the United States on the first board as the Americans took home the gold for the first time since 1976. In March, he will compete in the…
Have you heard? Chess fucks. And chess wants you all to know that it fucks, so it has graciously made it very clear in the logo for the upcoming 2018 World Chess Championship.
You probably remember the rules of chess, but what’s actually happening there on the board? How many moves are Grandmasters really thinking ahead? Why do they never actually checkmate the opponent? Is my life just like a game of chess?
The biggest chess story of the year is uplifting—and bogus.
The sports world is replete with notably wacky commissioners and leaders, and for all the wild shit that the Sepp Blatters and Oleg Tinkovs of the world get up to, the World Chess Federation’s president probably has them all beat. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has been the top dog at FIDE since 1995, and for most of that time he…
Hou Yifan is the highest ranked women’s chess player in the world. She became the youngest woman to reach the rank of grandmaster when she was 16, and she already had four World Championships under her belt by age 22. Her nickname is “Queen of Chess” and last year, she declined to defend her women’s World Championship…
I’ve watched most of the World Chess Championships without ever actually witnessing Magnus Carlsen or Sergey Karjakin make a single move. As fun as it would be to watch the two grandmasters squirm and fret while contemplating their moves, you only need to know where each player’s pieces are to follow the game. You can …
The World Chess Championship is being held in Manhattan this month, and defending champion Magnus Carlsen has been playing challenger Sergey Karjakin since Nov. 11. The Norwegian and the Russian danced their way to seven straight draws to open the match, which is the longest such streak to begin a championship match…
BERLIN – Let me say something obvious: fighting someone is exhausting. The switch—or whatever you want to call it—that flips when the lizard part of your brain tells the rest of you to hold off on metabolizing or thinking is inescapable. When you’re a novice fighter like me, the only thing you can think about is…
Magnus Carlsen has been in St. Louis since last week and will be staying through next weekend. If you're not up on your FIDE ratings, this is something like 2006-vintage Roger Federer doing a tennis residency in Toledo.
Thought leader Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has written a column about the Ukraine crisis, in which he argues, well, who knows. A good quarter of it is just an extended excerpt from a 16-year-old interview with George Kennan, who didn't think that committing to wage nuclear war on behalf of Eastern European…
Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion, Pussy Riot supporter, and probably the most famous living chess player, is running for the presidency of the World Chess Federation. His opponent—the incumbent—is a guy who believes in aliens.
In the mid-1980s, Bill Nack went searching for the chess master and recluse Bobby Fischer. He wrote about his experience for Sports Illustrated:
Our old pal Dave McKenna goes long on how cheating in chess is growing.
Aside from the boring/kick-ass/boring nature of chessboxing, as well as the occasional airing of Searching for Bobby Fischer on Starz, we can't say chess comes across our radar very often, but the 2012 World Chess Olympiad is underway in Istanbul. Tipster Jay L. brought to our attention that Grand Master Hikaru…
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