Chess Club Live Blog

 "Did I get 31 in 1 minute? I got 31 in 1 minute, I wasn't even paying attention..." - Hans Niemann I was on the fourth live stream that week with Hans Niemann. He was trying to beat the Puzzle Rush world record. "I got 62, I'm not going to break the world record tonight folks!" And with that, Hans hastily ended the stream. He pinged me on DM afterwards, wanting to know how I found his show. I told him it was awesome as usual and that I'd be following the next day. Hans Niemann is a precocious talent and is bursting with energy. When I got to know him he was a chess streamer and a very hardworking one at that. He would do a 6 hour stream, sign off to study chess then catch some sleep, all interspersed with school work. He was an IM and had ambitions to become a grandmaster but this was not his central focus. On Facebook I had a community of 250,000 which he seemed mildly impressed with and he was interested in engaging with them.. I connected with his da...

 The Masterspace is the brainchild of brilliant entrepreneurs Tarek and Sam Abilama who envisaged a chess playing experience that transforms the online chess paradigm. Tarek took me around the space he created for Chess Club Live on  https://chess.masterspace.io/space/chess-club-live   What I noticed firstly was the feeling I was in an actual chess tournament hall. I was walking around chess tables, a large screen showing live chess streaming event. There were sofas and even a chess bar for chilling out and relaxing. I walked by a huge demo board where lectures and lessons could be given to a seated audience. Tarek has invented a beguiling exotic chess future.  The idea came to Tarek during the pandemic when OTB chess events were suspended and everyone went online to play chess. He found the online chess offering not a good enough so he reimagined the chess playing experience to be a playing hall with tables, sofas, screen, demo board  and players navigating the...

 Magnus Carlsen’s gambit paid off. He played like he was the challenger. He was sacrificing pawns, exchanges, rooks, and his queen. Carlsen crushed Nepomniachtchi completely as he crumbled after the epic game 6. What was really weird was that Nepomniachtchi never went nuclear with the King’s Gambit. In game 11, he was -3 and it was the perfect chance to have a go with a romantic not seen at world chess championship level for a very long time. Instead he dodged the chance to really put caution to the wind and roll the dice. The King’s Gambit is an opening he’d essayed many times and is in fact a leading expert in the KG theory. Could it be Nepo assumed Magnus was well booked up on the theory and would neutralise his weapons? There was good reason to believe this since Nepomniachtchi had delivered a Chessable course on the King’s Gambit. 😂  Perhaps it is safe to say the only person who offered the true gambit was the King himself Magnus Carlsen. Congratulations 🥳 to Carlsen on...

  Hey these guys are sacrificing pawns and exchanges and throwing the kitchen sink at each other but ultimately ending each game peacefully. What is going on? Magnus Carlsen's two previous encounters with Karjakin and Caruana had bucket loads of draws.  Why on earth did we think it would be any different when Magnus played his former second, Nepomniachtchi? Magnus Carlsen is totally up for it this time round, he seems ready to fight and his calculated risks seem more edgy than ever before. Magnus has so much to lose if he is unable to defend his title but he seems able to put the sum of all those fears aside and sacrifice material for unbalanced positions. Chess like Tango does take two also so Nepomniachtchi is trying hard to get good positions out of the opening with his phenomenal preparation. Nepo seems to have done very well in predicting that Carlsen will go for main variations and choose sound less popular side lines.  Experienced chess players will know that aggre...

  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.