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Russia, the biggest superpower in chess, has been effectively banned from the game it considers its own, alongside its neighbour Belarus. FIDE, the world governing body of chess, took the momentous step to take action against both countries at an emergency meeting of its FIDE Council held today. It follows the international outcry over Russia's invasion of Ukraine which FIDE responded to initially by stripped Moscow of the 190-nation Chess Olympiad, which was due to take place in July. The new measures FIDE agreed were: Russia and Belarus banned from holding official FIDE chess competitions and events Russian and Belarusian...

Magnus Carlsen vs Ian Nepomniachtchi, 136 moves--Antonio has the call, condensing their nine-hour game to forty-four minutes.

FIDE Website.Magnus, the two-time defending champion, has the world's top rating in the classical-timeframe format at 2855, while Nepo is fifth-rated at 2782. In their previous classical games prior to this match, Nepo is ahead 4-1. The match is 14 classical games in Dubai. A win counts as 1 point and a draw as 1/2. Each player has two hours for his first 40 moves and one added hour for his next 20.

Once Abhimanyu Mishra and his father bought one-way tickets to get them from Englishtown, N.J. to Budapest, there was no turning back. The pandemic was still raging, but that tiny pathogen didn’t stop the countdown clock separating a 12-year-old boy known as Abhi from history. Mishra was on a mission to become the youngest ever chess grandmaster. “It was very scary and we knew it was a big risk,” Abhi said. “But we needed more tournaments. We had to try it.” For 77 days over the summer, Abhi and his father Hemant lived out of a Hungarian hotel room that...

Emirati grandmaster Salem Salah plays world champion Magnus Carlsen on Saturday, and could win $100,000Emirati chess champion Salem Salah is preparing for a speed chess tournament on Saturday, when he'll come up against the World Champion, Magnus Carlsen. Antonie Robertson / The National It was clear from a young age that Salem Saleh had startling talent, and an extraordinary mind. The Arab chess prodigy started winning professional championships aged only 10, and was named a grandmaster by the International Chess Federation (FIDE) when he was 16, a title currently held by 1,721 other players in the world. As Arab...

Netflix’s new limited series, “The Queen’s Gambit,” leads the site’s top ten most popular list for the third straight week since its late October premiere, making it one of the platform’s most-watched shows of 2020. This feat is all the more impressive considering the steep competition among streaming providers this year. Adapted from Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel and brought to life by veteran screenwriters Scott Frank and Allan Scott, the mini-series depicts the unexpectedly cutthroat world of 1960s chess against the lavish backdrop of the Cold War era, when chess boards were just another arena in which rival nations competed...

@MarkDice YouTube has taken down a video from a chess channel because it appears the A.I. detected language in the video about black vs white chess pieces and thought the guy was being racist! (Not a joke). Here's the poor dude's video explaining the details:

Agadmator runs an extremely popular chess-only youtube channel / subscription and it has been on with no problems for YEARS. He has a deffinite accent so I think he is of (a guess) slavic ancestry but speaks fluent English. Has done thousands(?) of game analysis for eras from Paul Morphy to current world Grand Master Magnus Carlsen. He was doing an interactive podcast when he got blocked by Youtube about an hour in. An immediate protest was almost immediately denied. Most likely an algorithm / bot, but an increasingly obvious hyper-sensitive Youtube habit.

Former Australian chess representative John Adams has hammered a Sydney radio station for asking if chess is racist because white always moves first. Adams revealed on Tuesday he’d received a call from a producer at ABC Sydney asking if he’d contribute to a segment on racism in chess that will hit the airwaves on Wednesday. “They called me up and asked whether I was the John Adams involved in chess,” Adams told The Daily Telegraph.

After an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Sydney radio station posed the question if chess is racist because it’s customary for the white pieces to move first, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and former Australian chess representative John Adams took to Twitter to slam the notion, calling it “bull—” and a waste of taxpayer dollars. Adams noted that ABC contacted him to make a comment on the segment, which is intended to run Wednesday. “They called me up and asked whether I was the John Adams involved in chess,” Adams told the Daily Telegraph. “Then they said with everything going on,...

Former Australian chess representative John Adams has slammed the ABC for organising a radio segment discussing whether the popular board game is racist. Professional economist Adams received a call from a Sydney-based ABC producer on Tuesday asking whether the game was racist because white always moves first. “I just received a phone call from an ABC Sydney based producer seeking a comment about the game of chess,” Adams posted to Twitter. “The ABC have taken the view that chess is RACIST given that white always go first! “They are seeking comment from a chess official as to whether the rules...

2 instant leaders after first round

Wesley So stunned World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen to win the inaugural World Fishcer Random Chess Championship at Henie Onstad Center in Norway Sunday (Manila time). The Filipino-American grandmaster, who now represents the United States, swept Carlsen 13.5-2.5 and started off the match defending with the black. “I’m very happy, it’s my favorite type of chess and it hasn’t been popular until the last couple of years,” So told Chess.com. “Magnus had a bad couple of days; if it was regular chess he would’ve beaten me easily.” “To me, mainly chess is art—that’s why I like Fishcer Random a lot;...

US President Donald Trump’s many critics insist he has no idea what he is doing in Syria. The assassination of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi over the weekend by US special forces showed this criticism is misplaced. Trump has a very good idea of what he is doing in Syria, not only regarding ISIS, but regarding the diverse competing actors on the ground. Regarding ISIS, the obvious lesson of the al-Baghdadi raid is that Trump’s critics’ claim that his withdrawal of US forces from Syria’s border with Turkey meant that he was going to allow ISIS to regenerate was...

IT SEEMS ABSURD. How could two humans -- seated for hours, exerting themselves in no greater manner than intermittently extending their arms a foot at a time -- face physical demands? Still, the evidence overwhelms. The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. "He looked like death," grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls. In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a...

The world of elite chess has been engulfed in a cheating scandal after a picture emerged of a top grandmaster sat on a toilet using a mobile phone during a tournament. Police are investigating after Igors Rausis, who has represented Latvia, Bangladesh and the Czech Republic, was caught 'red-handed' in France, the game's governing body Fide said. Phones are banned at chess tournaments because of chess software that can be used to suggest winning moves. Rausis, aged 58, had aroused suspicion by reaching the game's top echelon at an age most players decline in strength.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif this week demanded that the United States pull its troops out of the Persian Gulf region, arguing that such a move is “fully in line” with the interest of America and the world. His comments, made via his official Twitter account on Monday, came amid skyrocketing U.S.-Iran tensions, mainly stemming from Tehran’s decision to shoot down an American drone this month. The incident is bringing the two countries closer to a military conflict. Both have warned they are ready for war. “[U.S. President Donald Trump] is 100% right that the US military has no...

Buried in special counsel Robert Mueller's 400-plus page report is the question of whether then-president-elect Donald Trump attended a 2016 championship chess tournament — an event that came under scrutiny as Mueller probed possible collusion between Trump's orbit and the Russian government. Although Trump said he did not attend the event, he told Mueller in written answers that he became "aware of documents indicating" that then-president of the World Chess Federation (FIDE) Kirsan Ilyumzhinov — a sanctioned Russian power player — invited the Trump Organization in March 2016 to host the tournament at Trump Tower. "I do not remember having...

Thousands of dollars in donations are now pouring in to help find a home for a homeless 8-year-old Christian refugee who fled persecution with his family from Islamist sect Boko Haram in Nigeria, after he beat wealthier competitors to win New York State’s primary chess championship. The boy, Tanitoluwa Adewumi, who is affectionately called Tani, is currently living with his family in a homeless shelter in Manhattan and only started playing chess just over a year ago, according to an op-ed by The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof. Tani who is the new state chess king of the kindergarten through...

An eight-year-old boy who fled Nigeria with his family and is now living in a homeless shelter in New York City while his asylum application pends has been crowned the state's chess champion for his age group. Tanitoluwa Adewumi won the state tournament for his group, from kindergarten through third grade, last weekend. The boy and his family fled their home in Nigeria in 2017 in fear for their lives and have been living in a homeless shelter ever since while their application for asylum pends.