Luke McShane

Black to play. Gretarsson-Fressinet, European Individual Championship, November 2024. In this position, both players overlooked a decisive tactical idea. Which move should Black play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 2 December. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks

‘I kind of played old man’s chess in that game,’ said Magnus Carlsen, after winning a game against S.L. Narayanan, a top Indian grandmaster, at the Tata Steel Rapid in Kolkata last week. ‘No long variations, just positional chess.’ None of his moves would have come as a great surprise to his opponent, while Narayanan’s

To an outsider, we chess players might seem a rather uniform breed. Studious and contemplative, we spend hours absorbed in a board game to no apparent end. It is the archetypal thinker’s hobby. But within the subculture, there are many, perhaps even a majority, who identify as pragmatists, not thinkers. Results are the driving motivation.

Garry Kasparov retired from competitive chess in 2005, but has proved that at the age of 61 he remains competitive at the highest level. That is an extraordinary achievement in an time when just five of the world’s top 100 active players are older than 50. The former world champion joined a powerful field in

In 2016, the naming of a polar research ship was put to a public vote, and ‘Boaty McBoatface’ was the overwhelming winner. Should humanity’s fate ever be staked on a game of chess against alien invaders, I hope we don’t get a vote. If the internet has taught me anything, we would end up playing

Two of England’s brightest prospects received a golden opportunity to play at the WR Chess Masters Cup, an elite knockout tournament held at the Langham Hotel in London last week. WR is Wadim Rosenstein, a keen chess player and CEO of the German WR logistics group, which last year partnered with Fide to organise the

Congratulations to Sir Demis Hassabis, who last week was awarded a Nobel prize for his work on AlphaFold, which uses artificial intelligence to predict the structure of proteins. Developed by DeepMind, AlphaFold belongs to the same family of work as AlphaZero, which revolutionised computer chess when it was released in 2017, and before that AlphaGo,

There’s a piece of chess clickbait which occurs with tiresome regularity. The players are deep in the endgame, but have so little time remaining that the game cannot be concluded with dignity. Pieces land in between squares, or get dropped and clatter across the board. In their final seconds, players will attempt to move before

Mistakes in chess come in pairs. Last month, and not for the first time, that nugget of wisdom thumped me on the nose. Representing England at the Olympiad in Budapest, my game against Luca Moroni was proceeding rather pleasantly. It was clear the Italian grandmaster had underestimated my sacrifice of rook for bishop in the

White to play. Kulaots-Kadric, Budapest Olympiad, September 2024. The Estonian grandmaster spotted a neat sequence to gain a decisive material advantage. What was his first move here? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 30 September. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address

When I select puzzles to accompany this column, I stick to the plain vanilla. The stipulation must be short and sweet, and one move solutions must be accepted (though I like to include a few further words of explanation). Alas, a thousand such puzzles can never do justice to the wondrous ingenuity of chess composers.