Puzzle Friday 


White to move and mate in two. Can you spot the right response?

Levon Aronian on Chess Training

Levon Aronian:

As a rule, a strong chess player never trains with a strong chess player. You discover new steps and develop new strategies during the game, and it’s not desirable that another strong chess player knows about them. That’s why there are special assistants, who, although being good players, are not the strongest.

A great insight into the work put by a grandmaster into his chess. Read more about how he dealt with his defeat in the recent Candidates’ tournament and other issues in this Aronian interview.

Photo courtesy of Champord.

Sexism in Chess

Robbie Couch on Upworthy:

Ferrera shared a personal story about a young girl whose telling experience is a tough one to forget:

“I was moderating a conversation once among young women, and there was something that a young girl said that has really stayed with me. She stood up and she asked one of our panelists … ‘I was on the chess team. I was really good. But I was the only girl on the chess team, and it felt hard to be there, so I quit.’ And I haven’t been able to shake that. Because if we can’t get our young girls to stay in the room for the chess team, how are we gonna get them to stay in the room to be leaders in business, leaders in politics, leaders in medicine, leaders in science?”

A sad story, indeed. I know we still have to see a lot more women grandmasters competing at chess’ highest levels (Hou Yifan is currently the highest rated woman chess player at 2663 as of April 2016, and she’s only 85th and the only woman among the world’s top 100), but sexism shouldn’t be a reason why more women shouldn’t get to the top of the chess world.

Touch-Move Rule Adventures — errrr — Misadventures

GM Gregory Serper on Chess.com:

I am probably a lucky guy, because I never had any “touch-move rule” episodes in my whole chess career. Don’t get me wrong, it happened numerous times in my games that either I or my opponent touched a wrong piece at a wrong time, but in all such situations the game continued according to the tournament rules and no complaints were made.

Funny article. I guess the article should have been titled “Touch-Move Rule Misadvantures”.

Final Result: The 2016 China-USA Chess Grandmaster Summit

It can be recalled that the first two games ended in draws.

In the third match, someone indeed drew blood.

Playing as white, GM Ding Liren of China defeated GM Wesley So of USA in a Queen’s Gambit Declined in Game 3 of the 2016 China-USA Chess Grandmaster Summit.

The match continued with the final game — Game 4 — which ended in the third draw.

Thus, the match stood at 2.5-1.5 in favor of the Chinese Ding Liren.

Replay all the four games of the match.