A dispute that caused scandal in the world of elite chess appears to have been settled after the players involved said they have moved on from their rift.
Hans Niemann, a rising star in the chess world, filed a $100m lawsuit against Magnus Carlsen, the website chess.com and chess streamer Hikaru Nakamura after allegations he had cheated.
Continue reading...Article says Commons could bypass the parliamentary standards machinery after Labour leader says MP should be forced out. This live blog is closed
Starmer says there is a massive mismatch between what the government is saying about how things are going well with the economy, and the lived experience of people.
O’Brien suggests the two teenagers Starmer met today would have been happier if Starmer was still committed to getting rid of tuition fees.
I do think the current scheme is unfair and ineffective and that is why we will change it, so the current scheme will be changed by the incoming Labour government and we will set out our plans.
I am not going to pretend that there isn’t huge damage to the economy and that has meant that some of the things that an incoming Labour government would want to do we are not going to be able to do in the way we would want in the way that we would want.
We are working up our proposals on that and I will fully come back and talk them through when we got them.
Continue reading...The chess grandmaster, 58, on growing up in Baku, Putin’s bloody dictatorship and losing to Deep Blue
My mother was Armenian, my father Jewish. My father died when I was seven and my mother never remarried. She lived the rest of her 50 years for me. It’s the greatest thing that happened to me – I had a mother who dedicated her entire life to her only son.
I grew up in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the deep south of the USSR. Everybody spoke Russian because it was an imperial city. At 10, I was sent to the Young Pioneer Palace in Baku to learn how to play chess. It didn’t take long for me to see the gap between reality and propaganda.
Continue reading...The series incorrectly said the trailblazing player Nona Gaprindashvili had ‘never faced men’
Netflix will face a $5m defamation lawsuit by a Georgian chess master who alleges she was defamed in the hit series The Queen’s Gambit, after a judge refused to toss the suit on Thursday.
Nona Gaprindashvili, the first woman to be named a chess grandmaster, sued the streaming company in federal court in September. Gaprindashvili alleges that a line from The Queen’s Gambit, where a character incorrectly states that she had “never faced men”, is “grossly sexist and belittling”. Gaprindashvili had played against 59 male competitors by 1968, the year the show is set.
Continue reading...My grandfather was a man with a tut as loud as a dropped plate. He’d deploy it whenever you fell short in some way: a length of the pool finished too slowly; a garden bed not weeded well enough; a portion of vegetables left unfinished. But he softened over chess, a game he bequeathed to me over long sessions, played in our pyjamas by the fireplace. Across the board, his sternness would melt into a kind of pensive calm, the admonishments replaced with instructions and then a small smile when he saw the move that would win the game and send me to bed.
He played chess all his life and was chairman of his local club right up until he entered the retirement home where he died, but I didn’t follow his example myself until some 25 years later. By then it was too late to thank him.
Continue reading...The governing body is pushing to make the game more welcoming for women – but is change happening fast enough?
Towards the end of the Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix show that helped supercharge the new chess boom, Beth Harmon crushes a series of top male grandmasters before beating Vasily Borgov, the Russian world champion. Fiction, though, remains sharply separated from fact. As Magnus Carlsen was reminded before starting his world title defence in Dubai last week, there is not a single active woman’s player in the top 100 there is not a single active woman’s player in the top 100 now that Hou Yifan of China, who is ranked 83rd - is focusing on academia. The lingering question: why?
For Carlsen, the subject was “way too complicated” to answer in a few sentences, but suggested a number of reasons, particularly cultural, were to blame. Some, though, still believe it is down to biology. As recently as 2015 Nigel Short, vice president of the world chess federation Fide, claimed that “men are hardwired to be better chess players than women, adding, “you have to gracefully accept that.”
Continue reading...The world champion shares his motivational struggles before an intriguing showdown with his old rival Ian Nepomniachtchi
“I’m less hungry. I think you’re always going to be if you’re playing for the world title for the fifth time, rather than the first.” It is quite the opening gambit from Magnus Carlsen, in his final newspaper interview before he puts his crown on the line again. But sport’s deepest thinker is merely revving up before he truly opens up.
Carlsen has long established himself as the greatest chess player of his generation. Perhaps any generation, given he is the highest-rated of all time and has held the Fide world title since 2013. But there is something else that marks the Norwegian out in an era where sporting superstars are increasingly bland and on brand: his unflinching honesty.
Continue reading...For a sport that has struggled to attract female players, the news that chess has just agreed the biggest ever sponsorship deal for the women’s game would usually be universally welcomed.
But the decision of chess’s governing body, Fide, to partner with the breast enlargement company Motiva is facing growing criticism from some female players, who have called the decision “gross” and “misogynistic”.
Continue reading...The alert I get when an opponent has made their move gives me the shot of excitement I used to get from social media notifications
Lord help me, I am in the whirlwind throes of the beautiful game. Online chess. The ancient pastime enjoyed a boom late last year. And I got caught squarely in its blast. Chess.com, the internet’s leading chess platform, saw an eruption in activity, triggered by lockdown idleness and (my own personal inciting event) Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, which landed in October 2020, and showed the world that chess is actually really cool. As long as you ignore the actual chess and focus instead on the narcotic-fuelled psychodrama of a very beautiful woman and put the kid from Love Actually in a cowboy hat, for some reason.
But there was enough actual chess in the show to reawaken my old love for the game. I’d played a lot as a child, as you can probably tell from my face. I played in the school club and entered competitions. I collected sets, including a Simpsons one and a Lord Of The Rings one, allowing me to play the pieces from one board against those of the other. No, I didn’t go out much as a kid. But how could I when I was busy battling the dark forces of Sauron with an army of Barts?
Continue reading...As Magnus Carlsen prepares for a two-day final with his old rival Hikaru Nakamura, Wada’s ban on Russia has reached chess
Ian Nepomniachtchi’s feat in qualifying as Magnus Carlsen’s official challenger in a €2m, 14-game world title series at Dubai in November was subsequently hit on two fronts. First, having won the Candidates with a round to spare, Nepomniachtchi lost Tuesday’s dead rubber in Ekaterinburg. A more significant blow came on Friday, however, when he learned that he is not allowed to play with the Russian flag beside him in Dubai, owing to his country’s ban imposed by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Following Tuesday’s defeat by China’s Ding Liren, the 30-year-old Muscovite said that he had lacked motivation for the game, a strange comment when a win would have raised his Fide world rating close to 2800, the super-elite level, while as it was Ding’s victory regained the No 3 spot in the ratings that he had briefly let slip a few days earlier.
Continue reading...The chess grandmaster on speaking out against Vladimir Putin and why he cannot choose the best player ever
“I haven’t stopped my fight against the regime,” says Garry Kasparov, his words bristling with defiance and quiet rage. “I’m not lowering my voice. Putin is not just a Russian imperialist. He has a much bigger agenda. He is an existential threat to the free world.”
It would have been easy for the greatest chess player in history to stay quiet after fleeing Russia in 2013 amid a crackdown on prominent opposition figures. Kasparov, after all, is a successful businessman, an expert on artificial intelligence and cyber security, and has just launched a new website, Kasparovchess.com. But that has never been his style. Not now. Not ever.
Continue reading...The world champion lost his semi-final against Russian champion Ian Nepomniachtchi in the $200,000 Carlsen Invitational
Magnus Carlsen, the world champion, has been having a hard time in the $1.5m online Meltwater Champions Tour, supported by his own company Play Magnus Group. There are 10 qualifying tournaments leading to a final in the autumn and Carlsen, 30, who won the 2020 Tour, has so far this year been knocked out four times.
The first three Tour events were won by the US champion Wesley So (twice) and the Azerbaijan grandmaster Teimour Radjabov, while on Saturday and Sunday in the fourth event Carlsen will only compete for third place. The tournament’s name is the Magnus Carlsen Invitational, which makes it still more humiliating for the world champion.
Continue reading...The phrase ‘adult beginner’ can sound patronising. It implies you are learning something you should have mastered as a child. But learning is not just for the young
One day a number of years ago, I was deep into a game of draughts on holiday with my daughter, then almost four, in the small library of a beachfront town. Her eye drifted to a nearby table, where a black-and-white board bristled with far more interesting figures (many a future chess master has been innocently drawn in by “horses” and “castles”).
“What’s that?” she asked. “Chess,” I replied. “Can we play?” she pleaded. I nodded absently.
Continue reading...As the game enjoys a boom online, players ranging from grandmasters to preteens are getting caught ‘computer doping’
In one chess tournament, five of the top six were disqualified for cheating. In another, the doting parents of 10-year-old competitors furiously rejected evidence that their darlings were playing at the level of the world No 1. And in a third, an Armenian grandmaster booted out for suspicious play accused his opponent of “doing pipi in his Pampers”.
These incidents may sound extreme but they are not isolated – and they have all taken place online since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading...Shohreh Bayat warned after images circulated appearing to show her without a headscarf at Shanghai tournament
A chess referee from Iran has fled to the UK after being warned that she could be arrested for being in breach of Iran’s strict dress codes during an international tournament in China.
Shohreh Bayat, 32, has sought asylum in Britain after a photograph of her at the women’s world chess championships in Shanghai last month was circulated on social media. It appeared to show her without a headscarf, although she has insisted the scarf was in place but loose over her hair.
Continue reading...The International Chess Federation says it has suspended a player at a tournament in France after the man was “caught red-handed using his phone during a game”.
The organization said Friday on Twitter that all the evidence in the case of Igors Rausis had been sent to its ethics committee and that it was “determined to fight cheating in chess”.
Continue reading...Missing walrus tusk warrior was purchased in Edinburgh and stored in a drawer
A small walrus tusk warrior figure bought for £5 in 1964 – which, for years, was stored in a household drawer – is a missing piece from one of the true wonders of the medieval world, it has been revealed.
The Lewis chessmen were found in 1831 in the Outer Hebrides and became beloved museum collections in London and Edinburgh. They have also become well known in popular culture from Noggin the Nog to Harry Potter.
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