Chess Club Live Blog

  I t was in 2008 when I had finished my chess server WebChess X using open source code WebChess. I opened my chess server and found it was thriving but had a problem with some users cheating. I spent a few months in mid-2008 racking my brain as to how to solve the problem. I eventually came up with an idea. Why not create a test which randomly quizzes users with chess puzzles but make it time constrained and rated so I could validate that the ELO of the user was still consistent with the results they were getting. So I wrote the code in PHP utilising my database of over 10 million chess positions. I also used some open source code called LT PGN VIEWER by Lutz Tautenhahn which had a guess-the-move app, problem board script. The app recognises FEN strings from pgn files of game fragments and matches the move played with the move string loaded. The app I built was simple it randomly selected a position and asked the user to play the winning move. It had to be just that move because t...

Super Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura is one of the most gifted chess grandmasters there ever was. He grew up in the online chess slums playing blitz and bullet like a God. He is easily the best chess player at speed alive today. Having said all of that Hikaru is a very divisive character. The actions of his online team led to the Chess Drama earlier this year. Hikaru probably sees himself as a comic book hero like a chess superman but he has a chain of Kryptonite in the form of one Magnus Carlsen, the chess world champion. Hikaru Nakamura believes he is the reincarnation of Bobby Fischer. Let's just pause, Fischer was pretty much the perfect player, a gentleman at the board, equally good in tactical melees as stodgy strategic binds. Fischer had the emotional intelligence to realize being petulant on the board only helped his opponents. Hikaru hasn't learned that lesson yet. Hikaru is nowhere close. I am being kind, Hikaru is as far away from being Fischer as I am from being Hika...

  I had a horrific day on Lichess, you could self inflicted, I'd posted some forum posts and got bullied by some Lichess users who thought my thoughts were inconsequential and so I stopped using the forum temporarily while the bullies choose another victim and started watching tournament leaders in 5 min blitz Arena. I saw the most audacious move I've ever seen. The move was 15...Bd3+ It's ridiculously audacious decadent overambitious whimsical and pompously brilliant. Chess has the power to make me happy 😊 even after being bullied on Lichess Forum, like wow. Of course the move is a high class blunder because white should play 16.Nf6+ and come out with the edge but white didn't in the actual game. The beguiling 15...Bd3+ mesmerising mercilessly and leading white to follow the line 16.Bxd3 Nb4, even now 17.Kxb2 is not forced and not as bad but in for the penny in for the pound. It's a beautifully stunning blunder. Check out the full game on Lichess. 

 I spent a terrifying 24 hours posting comments on the Lichess forum and ended up being personally shaken down by Thibault Duplessis and his admins as well as loyal users who thought I needed a public beating too. What were the offending posts that I was posting that shook up the world's most popular chess website and the second biggest chess server on Earth? Posted 7 messages in  My Chess Coach is a 1400 elo player Does a coach need to have a decent rating or can they be a patzer whith a 1400 elo rating? Just asking for a friend. @Pulsifier I've seen plenty of coaches with really low ratings "training" people higher rated than them lol @ryan121 it's online rating lol @Sarg0n That's the thing he's low rating and high price. I was hoping for the other way round lol @Steven-ODonoghue I posted a few topics having not posted for a long time. I also responded to topics of others I thoug… @jamesB009 Yes he’s on here but I don’t want to get him any unwanted atten...

 I have to admit I don't know my Knight and Bishop endgame very well. There are a lot of us out there. So I remember someone telling me that Lichess has a really good training system for this. Lichess Practice: Checkmating with Bishop and Knight The training system is so good that it takes you through a course the is interactive and gives you the history around the endgame and some examples of epic fails. Soon I'll be able to show up in civilized chess society as a player who can mate with Bishop + Knight lol. Just an aside, the game Ushenina vs Girya is an interesting game where the then Women's Chess World Champion, Grandmaster Anna Ushenina played a super-strong game to reach the ending against the very strong Grandmaster Olga Girya, to do this she had to eliminate all Girya's pawns and avoid stalemate tricks which she did and almost mated her on the spot but for one important fact, Olga's King was trapped in the wrong corner!!! Anna knew this of course and set a...

 I watched The Queen's Gambit on Netflix as soon as it was released. I may have been in the first half million people in the world to have watched it as I watched pretty much sitting motionless for 7 hours but for comfort breaks. Afterwards, I tried to find out what Netflix had done on social media for the show. I went onto Facebook, nothing, Twitter, nothing, Instagram nothing but some weird stan account with tens of thousands of fans but didn't even seem like they were legit or even pretending to be. In a panic, I even went to TikTok and of course nothing. Okay so I went back to Twitter, they had posted some low key promotion on Netflix and Netflix Queue but still, no dedicated social media account anywhere. I was astounded. Well, this just was not going to be good enough for me (and I suspected a few million chess fans and randoms). I started writing DMs to Netflix Executives and eventually found the actual Social Media Manager. I told her exactly what I thought about the am...

 Okay, Garry Kasparov made time out of his day from fighting for democracy and against injustice to create his new chess platform . That should tell you all you need to know about how important this is for the chess world. Why do we need yet another chess platform? Isn't chess.com, chess24.com, chessable.com, chessbase.com, and all the rest enough? Well no not really. Play Magnus has bought up almost everyone that isn't chess.com and chess.com, well we all know about chess.com it's bucks before books. So on one hand you have a Megalomanic chess world champion trying to own the entire chess world and on the other hand, you have a team of megalomanics who own the whole chess world trying to champion their own vision of the chess world, it's a tough choice. So Ex-world champion Garry Kasparov gives the free of mind a choice for where they invest their chess dollars for a valued return without the drama. Garry Kasparov has been giving to chess for a long time without asking...