Played a really nice game tonight vs a 2100ish dude that trashed me earlier this season:

http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game....php?id=106743

He plays the Colle System usually with the Zukertort b3-Bb2 business but I managed to trick him with my move order and ended up playing the Black Lion Philidor that GingerGM Simon Williams made a recent video about.

Nice tactics going trough it rapidly.
But not taking your knight on e6 with Bc4 and playing g3 instead seem bad and bishop takes bishop see bad as well ( at first glance f5 seem much safer) without much thinking tho only if you do not see kng4.

Nice game

Gotta be honest but I actually preferred delay. Made it much more dramatic when you got low on time, but still gave you enough time to win a hopelessly won position.

The general idea of the following cute easy puzzle has come to me today in my sleep

I wrote a bot that chooses from legal moves at random. The first time I had it play itself, black delivered checkmate in 57 moves. Stepping through the game was fun.

It randomly chose to open with:

1. Nf3 d6
2. c3 Nc6
3. h3 Bf5

Those are some pretty reasonable, human-like moves! I was really excited at this point. But, of course, it immediately descended into farce of both sides hanging pieces but deciding not to capture anything until black eventually just sort of accidentally checkmated white.

But it's comforting that I now have an engine I can absolutely crush every time.

I can't believe you didn't add the fourth moves Na3, Nf6. Na3 is okay yo.

If the probability of each of the legal moves is made equal, then the bot moves the queen way too often.

That's the only problem you see with the computers strategy?

I feel like just going through that game actually has a negative impact on my chess

hey guys me and some friends have started a restaurant with some of our tournament winnings. since I like you guys, if you use the code 2+2chess you can get 50% off your first meal and 20% off any meals after that. bon appetit!

What kinds of kibble do you serve?

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comme..._stop_maurice/

MVL played Caruana on chess.com for 3 hours of blitz. pretty close until bullet which MVL destroyed him in.

we serve five-star cuisine, not kibble, but we do keep pizza bites and chicken nuggets around for the well-behaved humans

More like Ernesto Carlsen

I've never even heard of that guy and/or don't know who that is.

That run is pretty ridiculous, though!

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1801260

Wrong side of this one from the last World Cup, but fun game to replay.

Aaaand he beat Kovalenko, too.

He has been hovering around 2700 for a while, but this is of course a massive breakthrough, if he can keep it at that level. Been following him more closely since Moscow Open which he completely demolished while also playing great, attractive chess. Scored something like 8.5/9 with a ridiculous field, but this one is even more sick. I am trying to find a super crazy game which I am FAIRLY sure was played by him recently, will share if I do.

Rei named him the best looking male top-100 player in 2015. I'm indifferent to Ernesto's appearance but he has a decent group of supporters

Lol. Oh he's that guy! I thought he was just a pretty face. Looks like he may be the total package.

Eh, my memory deceived me - the game was indeed from Moscow Open, but played between Timofeev and Eliseev, not Inarkiev.

Still, worth going over if you want to feel like you have no idea about what's happening in a chess game for about 40 moves:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1821867

#7-10 on the previous lists were just table fillers, so here are some updated rankings for the women's side, including a few who weren't top-100 at the time of the last list:

#	Player	Rating	Country
1	Anna Muzychuk	2555	Ukraine
2	Tania Sachdev	2398	India
3	Sopiko Guramishvili	2376	Georgia
4	Kateryna Lagno	2529	Russia
5	Karina Szczepkowska-Horowska	2411	Poland
6	Alexandra Kosteniuk	2556	Russia
7	Yuliya Shvayger	2415	Israel
8	Mariya Muzychuk	2561	Ukraine
9	Elisabeth Pähtz	2489	Germany
10	Nazi Paikidze	2366	USA

Tiers: #1-#3, small drop, #4-7, big drop, #8-10.

Alexandra Kosteniuk has fallen many spots because ultra-polished photoshoot pics aren't worth considering, I've decided. Yuliya Shvayger could be #4 or even higher, but it's hard to say because she has almost no pics publicly available. I'm not sure how to rank Nazi Paikidze -- half of her pics are quite solid, the others not so much -- but #10 isn't a very important slot. That slot's previous occupant Hou Yifan isn't #1 even in China alone; Shen Yang tops her but didn't make this latest list because of a limited and inconsistent sample of adult-age pics.

Oh yeah: Sopiko rose three spots exclusively due to wedding dubstep. GOAT.

wtf

Just noticed that the Gashimov Memorial started.



Will be interesting to see if Harikrishna and Eljanov can become stable members of the supertournament circuit. Both participated in last month's Norway Chess, where Harikrishna had a solid showing and Eljanov got wrecked. Hou Yifan hasn't had her own breakthrough yet, but here is another opportunity. This is Karjakin's first major event since ducking Magnus winning the Candidates -- will be interesting to see what he brings out.

I'm eager to see if Caruana takes the candidate loss personally and goes after Karjakin. From what it seems, I doubt he will. But it'd be nice to see him really want this one simply to show up Karjakin.

Maybe even throw some shade on him at some point in the post game talking about how he isn't a duck.