Yeah, Maurice and Yasser were trolling the youngsters so hard, relentlessly exposing the moments when the young guns had made noob mistakes. 'What lessons have you learned from the game / tournament?' was Maurice's omnipresent question.

Iirc, as Anna Zatonskih put it in her interview in the last round, the young ladies were playing like 2400s for the first 20 or so moves but were making terrible mistakes afterwards, which probably applied to herself too, as she admitted.

Carissa Yip is what 12 years old and rated 2150 so...yeah, she's not going to be playing like a 2400 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

However, she did somehow beat a GM (Alex Ivanov) at age 10 (almost 11), and now she's beat Irina Krush herself (though Irina was admittedly in a terrible shape in the latter half of the tourney).

If she learns to convert / transform advantages in the endgame, she'll end up playing at IM (maybe GM) strength overall. The youngsters' prep seems to be focused too much on the opening book.

Ashritha Eswaran's performance is about as impressive, of course.

According to chess-db, Carissa has gained 38 FIDE rating points in the tourney to achieve a live rating of 2202, whereas Ashritha has gained 36 points to make it 2261. They've had no other rated games that count for the May list.

Jennifer R Yu's gain from the US women's championship alone has been 55 points according to chess-db, but she had played one more game qualifying for May (in the North Virginia Chess League) losing 27.2 rating points according to FIDE, so her May rating is going to be 2185.

Strangely enough, Carissa has been too lazy to apply for the WFM title; now she qualifies for the unigender CM title too (unless I've missed some earlier FIDE rated games of hers that count for May but whose results haven't been submitted to FIDE yet), but perhaps she's not going to apply for it either.

Speaking of higher rated girls, it seems that no prodigy who could excel Hou Yifan has been born yet



Wth has been Nomin-Erdene's 42-point slump in 18 games at the Women's Asian Nations Cup and the Dubai Open

Even Gabriela Antova (women's U-14 leader), whose live rating has briefly crossed 2300 after round 1 of the Bulgarian women's championship (and who has thus qualified for the FM title*) but has now fallen to 2268 (if I'm not mistaken) as a result of today's loss to Maria Vasova, is so ridiculously behind Katerina Lagno's pace that I doubt Gabriela is a prominent prodigy.

* Her path to the title looks shady because she had earned 22.4 points for the 7/7 score in the Bulgarian U-14 girls' championship where all of her opponents were rated below 1875 (even below 1532!!) and thus all the rating differences were regarded as 400 for her rating calculation, very much in her favour. Lol at FIDE.

omg that was you? Jenn has been going nuts for years trying to find that mysterious handsome boy by the swimming pool.

A couple years from now when the inevitable happens, make sure to post a dubstep video of the wedding.

Wow, I'm glad I spoke up so she can now rest easy the rest of her life knowing that unsolvable mystery is finally figured out!

I'm not really sure if she is with someone or not but I am happily married so unfortunately I think we're about 20 years too late on this epic missed opportunity.

However, if it were to go down, while Jennifer would have her work cut out for her vs. Sopiko, I feel very confident I could easily outdo Anish in a wedding video dubstep-off.

Jenn may wish to hold a mixed poker-chess tourney for men to compete for her hand.

What does she do when her brother wins? He would obv be the champ.

(ok, sure, there are probably quite a few GMs who are decent at poker, but many more who are awful I'm sure)

Depends on what state they were born in.

The competition would be held only among those who're eligible for marriage with Jenn, so Greg would be excluded. Alternatively, Greg could act as a guard of his sister's celibacy, i.e. if he won the tourney, she'd have to look for a better fiance, as anyone who can't even beat Greg is not worthy enough

This is one of the weirdest sounding things.

What is with Saint Louis always insisting on using this delay bull****? Increment is the standard everywhere in the world. I don't get it.

LOL delay.

Garry such a beast.

I just assumed Kasparov requested delay and they said "Sure, your call Garry!"

I'm surprised that Hikaru (a blitz god) is trailing Fabi (a relative blitz fish) by a full point.

Hikaru has just played 4. h4!, 5. h5!! in game 7, should beat Fabi now.

This commentary is terrible. The game is too fast for it.

Yeah this idea is why 1. d4 g6? has been refuted. (2. h4 Δ 3. h5 1-0.)

Maurice Ashley: "The engine says!" "Recommended by the engine!" "The engine thinks this is crushing!" "Engine engine engine engine engine!"

It's tilting how many things are consistently done wrong in chess broadcasting.

Definitely not. Garry is having huge time management problems, he'd surely benefit from an increment (the ability to accumulate seconds for further use).

These parentheticals amuse for me some reason.

Did Nakamura just admit that in the candidates he wouldn't have let the touch move fly?

Takes a special kind of person to be a **** even when he's nice.

Nobody lets the touch move go by in the candidates. Kasparov was either lying or going senile. He almost hit the clock already.

I was talking about the interview during which Naka complained about Aronian not letting his own touch move go in the candidates. Tonight he was like, look, it's an exhibition, it's Garry, so I let it go. I wouldn't in a more serious event.