spent 1hr collectively on two moves, found the 46th best move for each

poor nijat

nijat is going to cheat his way to victory today ending my hopes of winning this

whatever happened to niemann?

was blacklisted / semi-blacklisted from big events for a while and a few months ago he trashed a hotel room in St. Louis so the chess club there banned him for events for a year.


Personally I love his brand of interesting / fighting chess (I also own his Chessable Lifetime Repertoire Jobava London course) and would like to see him face off against the world's best.

Nepo in Candidates is just different

Basically high level chess is rogged. Most of the elite tournaments are by invitation only, and especially during the cheating allegations, when Magnus wouldn't even play with Hans, Hans couldn't get invited to anything. It was a one-man blackballing instigated by the champ. As a result, he kept having to play in open tournaments. The rating system is designed around playing at your level, and playing all these randos tanked Hans's rating. That and the lawsuit caused stress, and that didn't help either.

Magnus blackballing Hans was likely worse than it seemed, since there's a decent chance that an stock swap was involved in the Chess.com acquisition of Play Magnus, leaving Magnus with an ongoing interest in Chess.com, and Chess.com with an ongoing interest in keeping Magnus on side.

Hans was obviously helped by the settlement with Magnus and Chess.com. But now his biggest problem is that Rex Sinquefield or someone in his inner circle apparently hates his guts, and his St. Louis Chess Club empire is now blackballing Hans. The pretext is that he trashed a hotel room once, but that doesn't really seem to stand up to scrutiny. Hans is neither the first, nor the last, elite GM to trash a room or otherwise lash out stupidly.

So Hans is now shut out of the elite North American chess events, and is having to travel around the world more than a player like him would normally have to.

sounds like we should get the 2p2 overlords to sponsor a vegas based chess cup

Yeah that was a brilliant game yesterday

why does wikipedia not show russian flag? is that a chess thing or wiki thing?

nvm i found it

quitting gambling

Firouzja may be getting his ass kicked, but his fashion is on point!

Yep. Firouzja is 2850 ELO in fashion minimum.

Hikaru is making a run.

was checking to see if that was the final result

looks like this is still live

but while checking came across this on the wiki, don't understand anything about it positionally, but the commentary sure doesn't bode well for our champion



i also learned i have no idea how chess notation works because i don't see how the queen can move to f2 in a single turn, also looks like he already castled and the pawn is on f2 so how could the queen have been there in the past?

are we playing ghost chess?

i also learned i have no idea how chess notation works because i don't see how the queen can move to f2 in a single turn, also looks like he already castled and the pawn is on f2 so how could the queen have been there in the past?

Firouzja is playing the black pieces in that notation.

lolololol, now it makes sense

Did Caruana forget how to play chess in the last 2 months? What the heck. His prep also seems to be far off his 2018-2022 peak.

Also, really surprised to see Gukesh doing so well, at his age this is pretty sick. Tied for 1st and has better pairings than Nepo going forward so has a real chance at winning the tournament. (Although I really hope he does not, having a world #10 who is 100+elo behind the rating leader as a world champion would be very strange)

Alireza is a principled man. He sees a pawn, he takes it.

But yeah the ellipsis before the move means it's a black move. It means we don't care what the white move was, we're focusing on black.

Because technically a 'move' is a pair. For example if we were discussing the Ruy Lopez:

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5

We might say that black has the option to play the Morphy 3. ... a6 to kick out the white Bishop, or the Smyslov 3. ... g6 to fianchetto his own black square bishop.

Really interesting now. 3 rounds to go and still 4 people who could potentially win the tournament.

Should have bet on Nepo and Naka at those original odds