Raymond Keene

This Saturday (2 March) sees the annual varsity match between the teams of Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford are strengthened this year by the addition of China’s Hou Yifan, the former women’s world champion, and are likely to be the favourites.   As usual, the match starts at noon in the traditional venue of the RAC in

This year’s Gibraltar Masters saw some surprising results at the top, chiefly the victory by the young Russian, Vladimir Artemiev, who netted £25,000. He came in ahead of a host of established grandmasters, including Levon Aronian, Vassily Ivanchuk, Michael Adams and Wesley So.   The winner’s style was marked by restless aggression with both black and

The former world champion Vladimir Kramnik recently announced his retirement from competitive chess. He is one of the greats of the modern game, winning three World Championship contests — against Garry Kasparov, Peter Leko and Veselin Topalov — and retaining the title from 2000 to 2007. This tenure puts him on a par with other champions such as José Capablanca,

A notable feature from the recently concluded elite tournament at Wijk aan Zee was the abject failure of former world champion Vladimir Kramnik, who finished in equal last place. I have been conjecturing that it might be time for him to put his pieces back in the box, in the style of the Rubaiyat of

The start of the year sees the elite of the chess world divided between Wijk aan Zee in Holland and the Gibraltar Masters. In Gibraltar, from where I am writing this column, grandmasters such as Wesley So, Lev Aronian and Hikaru Nakamura cross swords with the British aspirants Michael Adams, Gawain Jones and Nigel Short.

Game Changer, the long-awaited book by Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan, has now appeared. This represents the most thorough inside story about the sensation that is AlphaZero. It includes material by the DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis and by Garry Kasparov, who must be gratified by the authors’ conclusion that DeepMind’s brainchild plays in the style of the 13th

The 2018 UK Knockout, won by Gawain Jones, ahead of Luke McShane (silver) and Michael Adams (bronze), was played in conjunction with the rather unsatisfactory finale of last year’s Grand Tour. The latter ended in victory for the US grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who prevailed over Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in the final. Sadly there was a dearth

The Dutch grandmaster Genna Sosonko specialises in biographies of the greats of the Soviet era. His earlier forays covered the careers of David Bronstein and Viktor Korchnoi; the latter is my choice of book of the year for 2018. Now Sosonko, a Soviet émigré himself, has turned his focus on Vassily Smyslov, world champion from 1957 to

The time has come again when I award the accolade of most spectacular game of the year. It adds lustre if this is from one of the great matches. However, not one of the games from the London World Championship comes close to creating the requisite brilliance and drama. Instead, my choice falls on the game Aronian-Kramnik

Last week I compared the Norwegian world chess champion Magnus Carlsen to a lurking crocodile, ready to grab its oblivious prey. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is that of the whale in Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘haply slumbering on the Norway foam…’. Mariners in Milton’s narrative mistake the leviathan for an island, moor their craft, and