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A heartbreaking miss for Harsha Bharathakoti in Sants International Open

22/09/2019 -

India's 56th Grandmaster Harsha Bharathakoti has been in tremendous form lately. First he became the unbeaten champion of 3rd Warakomska Memorial held in Poland earlier in August; next he came very close to winning the Sants International title in Spain but, due to an unfortunate misapprehension, ended up finishing as runner up instead. The 21st Sants International Chess Open took place from the 23rd of August to 1st September in Cotxeres de Sants in Barcelona, Spain. A total of 18 Indians participated in the event, the highest rated among whom was Grandmaster Vaibhav Suri. Harsha started off as the 21st seed in the tournament but a string of strong performances enabled him to climb up the leaderboard and almost become the champion!   

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The Drunken Master Opening – a Treasure House of Tactics, Traps, Tricks, and Trolling!

22/09/2019 -

How would you react if your opponent just moved all their pawns to the third rank of the board in the opening and still managed to hold ground? Wesley Falcao, a National Master living in New York, did exactly this in some of his blitz games. The result: this seemingly drunken manner of opening the game actually caught some strong players including IMs and GMs off guard, provoked errors and produced some really entertaining games. In this article, Wesley shares many games thematically, annotates almost every game and asks the readers to give it a try, at least in an online blitz game. Photo: Wesley Falcao

Deepan Chakkravarthy is the winner of 1st Lakecity GM Open

21/09/2019 -

The 1st Lakecity International Grandmaster Open came to a successful conclusion here in Udaipur on Friday. At the end of ten rounds four players finished on the top tied on 8.0/10 points each. However, on the basis of tie-break scores, India's Deepan Chakkravarthy, who remained unbeaten throughout the event, was declared as the champion. Russian Grandmasters Maxim Lugovskoy and Ivan Rozum had to settle for the second and third places respectively; while Neelotpal Das, who scored as many points as the podium finishers, was relegated to the fourth spot. In the final round of the tournament, the encounters on the top six boards all ended in draws and on board seven IM Mitrabha Guha registered an emphatic victory against Odisha's Rajesh Nayak to secure fifth position in the overall standings.

Using Fat Fritz in the Engine Cloud

21/09/2019 -

This past week we announced the release of Fat Fritz. It is a Neural Network program, inspired by Google's AlphaZero project, and it runs on the latest and most powerful hardware that is currently available. It has been secretly tested by a number of leading players, but it is now available for regular users as well. You cannot buy Fat Fritz — it's only use it in the Engine Cloud. For those who have never used this service before here is a brief tutorial.

World Cup 2019 Rd.4.1: Can Wesley So script a comeback?

21/09/2019 -

Even if all of the ten Indian players are eliminated, the World Cup 2019 remains to be one of the most exciting events with 16 players in the fray going into round four. The reason? Well, you usually see guys like Ding Liren, MVL, Svilder, Wesley So, Nepo, Aronian, Mamedyarov, Grischuk in super tournaments fighting it out against each other. But here you also have players like Alekseenko, Duda, Xiong, Vitiugov, Le Quang Liem, who are quite strong, but do not get a chance to fight against these elite players in normal super tournaments. In round four we saw quite a few interesting match-ups and some of them didn't go as expected. Wesley So lost to Vitiugov and young Alekseenko managed to hold Ding Liren to a draw with black!

Humpy takes sole lead in Skolkovo FIDE Women's Grand Prix

20/09/2019 -

Koneru Humpy continues her winning streak by scoring her fourth consecutive win in Skolkovo FIDE Women's Grand Prix 2019. The Indian ace beat Valentina Gunina in round 9 to take sole lead. Gunina tried to surprise Humpy with Blumenfeld Gambit and then by sacrificing an exchange, Humpy converted her advantage in the middlegame to a full point with accurate play to win the game and lead the tournament with two rounds left to go. Photo: David Llada / FIDE

Tutorial CB 15: Finding critical moves (1)

20/09/2019 -

Critical moves are, well, critical. They decide about win, loss or draw. To feel when a critical position arises is crucial to improve your game. ChessBase 15 helps you to find and to analyse these critical critical moments in your games or games by others – and to turn your findings into training questions which you save in a database with critical moves. Drawing: ChessBase

Lakecity GM R09: Deepan hoodwinks Sidhant, Neelotpal's stoic resistance triumphs!

20/09/2019 -

Deepan Chakkravarthy won against Sidhant Mohapatra to get back on the lead with 7.5/9 points after the penultimate round of the Lakecity GM Open here in Udaipur. He is joined by three other players including Grandmaster Neelotpal Das who beat the in-form Mitrabha Guha with the black pieces to join the leaders. Elsewhere, Hesham Abdelrahman was defeated by the top seed Ivan Rozum, while GM Maxim Lugovskoy got the better of IM Sayantan Das. The fight for the title would be tight in the final round not just between the leaders but also the six players who follow them closely just half a point behind. In this article we bring you the games, analyses, photos, and much more from the ninth round of the event.

Humpy is now World no.3

19/09/2019 -

The Indian ace Koneru Humpy beat former women's World no.1 Pia Cramling and former Women's World champion Antoaneta Stefanova in round 6 and 7 respectively to climb to World no.3 in the live rating list. Humpy is currently at the sole second position with a score of 5.0/7 at Skolkovo FIDE Women's Grand Prix, half point behind the sole leader, reigning Women's World champion Ju Wenjun who is at 5.5/7. Humpy is yet to face Ju Wenjun and they will face off in the final round. Photo: David Llada / FIDE

1 trainer + 3 students + 1 month in Spain = 500+ Elo points!

19/09/2019 -

People often wonder - why should you go to a foreign country when there are so many tournaments taking place in India. Well, more than anything else it is an exposure of playing in a new place against new opponents. But when you read Mumbai based coach Amit Panchal's account of the one month trip to Spain with the students of his Chess Guru academy, you will realize the benefits are more than just the novelty factor. Amit writes about his experience of spending one month in Spain for three tournaments that he planned with the help of ChessBase India Power. He went there with three of his students and they all came out with flying colours gaining overall more than 500 Elo points.

Lakecity GM R08: Hesham Abdelrahman takes sole lead

19/09/2019 -

Hesham Abdelrahman of Egypt defeated the Chilean Grandmaster Rodrigo Vásquez Schroder in the eighth round of Lakecity GM Open to register his fourth consecutive victory and take sole lead in the event. The much anticipated match-up between the in-form Indians Mitrabha Guha and Sayantan Das ended in a draw after a 73-move long battle. Elsewhere, Deepan Chakkravarthy too held top seed Ivan Rozum with the black pieces. Grandmaster Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh suffered yet another shock as 2124 rated Maharashtrian player Pranav Shetty got the better of him with white pieces. In this report we bring you the games, analysis, and more.

IM Khusenkhojaev wins Courtalam Saaral FIDE Rated Open

18/09/2019 -

IM Muhammad Khusenkhojaev of Tajikistan surged ahead of six other players who tied with him, to clinch the title of the 1st Courtalam Saaral (a mixture of cool breeze and continuous slight drizzling) FIDE rated tournament organised by Tirunelveli Development Chess Association at Courtalam from 29th August to 2nd September. Total 306 players from four different federation Chile, Nepal, India and Tajikistan participated including a GM and four IMs. Photo: R Anantharam

Lakecity GM R06+07: Deepan, Mitrabha, and Sayantan in joint lead

18/09/2019 -

Deepan Chakkravarthy, Sayantan Das, and Mitrabha Guha lead the ongoing Lakecity Grandmaster Open along with three others after the completion of seven rounds here in Udaipur. The trio has remained unbeaten so far with an impressive score of 6.0/7 points each. Yesterday the event had double rounds, round six from 9:30 a.m in the morning and round seven from 3:30 p.m in the afternoon. The sixth round was particularly eventful as all encounters in the top boards reached decisive results. Deepan and Sayantan beat compatriots Neelotpal Das and Saptarshi Roy respectively, while Mitrabha Guha got the better of Bangladeshi GM Ziaur Rahman. In round seven however the games in the top three boards ended in draws but Hesham Abdelrahman of Egypt defeated Bharat Kumar Reddy Poluri to join the lead!

World Cup 2019 Rd.3.2: The end of India's journey at Khanty Mansiysk

18/09/2019 -

India's journey at the World Cup 2019 has come to an end after two classical games in the third round. Harikrishna in his bid to win against Alekseenko, overpressed and lost the game and the match 2-0. Vidit tried his best, but couldn't get anything substantial against Wesley So and lost the match 1.5-0.5. India began with 10 participants in Khanty Mansiysk. Five of them were eliminated in round one, three in round two and finally Harikrishna and Vidit in round three. Not the best result, but as Vidit wrote after the event, "I am down but not out. The spirit is still high." We have a look at the two critical games from round 3.2 and also try to understand whether Harikrishna's daring sacrifice actually worked or not.

Live Games of World Cup 2019

17/09/2019 -

The tenth edition of FIDE World Cup 2019 is being held at Khanty Mansiysk, Russia. Ten Indian players will fight for their place in the finals out of 128 players around the world in a knockout format. The top two players qualify for the Candidates 2019. Vishy Anand has decided to give this event a miss. Indian players include P. Harikrishna, Vidit Gujrathi, Surya Sekhar Ganguly, Adhiban Baskaran, Sethuraman, S.L.Narayanan, Abhijeet Gupta, Aravindh Chithambaram, Nihal Sarin and Karthikeyan Murali. After the second round we have two Indians left in the fray (Harikrishna and Vidit). On this page you can follow all the action along with live comments by IM Sagar Shah. 

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