chessismyaesthetic

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Congratulations❤️

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!!

Gukesh wins the world chess championship 7.5 to 6.5 LET'S GOOOOOOO

With this, Gukesh becomes not only the second Indian (after Vishy Anand) to hold the title, but also the youngest undisputed world chess champion in history!

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I am so happy for Gukesh!!

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Photo from Garry Kasparov’s website titled Karpov watching, 1985

“I know Kasparov as well as I know anyone. I know his smell. I can read him by that. I recognize the smell when he is excited and I know when he is scared. We may be enemies, but we are intimate enemies.”

Anatoly Karpov in Paul Hoffmann’s memoir King’s Gambit

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Mikhail Tal & Tigran Petrosian playing table-tennis, 1959

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mikhail tal returning to riga from a tournament in italy, 1957

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michael fitzpatrick

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Oh fuck they’re mechanizing them now

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A moment from a Fischer-Tal game, played during the world championship candidates tournament in 1959, as told by Tal:

It was here that a widely-known psychological duel took place between us. Every player has his own habit: one will first make his move and then write it down, while another will do things the other way round. In our game Fischer first wrote down the move 22.Rae1!, without doubt the strongest, and wrote it, not in his usual English notation, but in European, almost Russian! Then he not very deftly pushed the scoresheet towards me. ‘He’s asking for an endorsement’, I thought to myself, but how was I to react? To frown was impossible, if I smiled he would suspect ‘trickery’, and so I did the natural thing. I got up and began to calmly walk up and down the stage. I met Petrosian, made some joke to him, and he replied. The 15-year-old Fischer, who was essentially still only a large child, sat with a confused expression on his face, looking first at the front row of the spectators where his second was sitting, and then at me. Then he wrote down another move: 22.Qc6+?and after 22…Rd7 23.Rae1+ Be7 24.Rxf7 Kxf7 25.Qe6+ Kf8! 26. Qxd7 Qd6 I held on to my extra piece and adjourned the game in a won position. When I later asked Fischer why he hadn’t played 22.Rae1, he replied, “Well, you laughed when I wrote it down!”

Sidenote, Bobby Fischer was 16 in 1959 when this game was played, Tal has his age wrong.

[Images of the position under cut]

The position before move 22, Fischer’s comments on the game seem to imply that white is winning and would have maintained the advantage with Ra-e1; Stockfish says black is winning and Ra-e1 would have made it even.

The moves 22.Qc6 Rd7 23.Rae1+ Be7 24.Rxf7 Kxf7 25.Qe6+ Kf8 26. Qxd7 Qd6, after which white can only aim for a draw and ultimately ended up losing.

The Chessbase article that I used as the source for this allows you to click through the whole game, with the annotation from various players and potential variations alongside the moves, def worth checking out.

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Magnus and Ian about to cause trouble in class

August 4, 2024 - Round 9, FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Team Championships

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Happy birthday Tigran Petrosian (1929-1972)!

One of my favourite chess players who most people haven't heard of, "Iron Tigran" was a Soviet-Armenian chess grandmaster and World Chess Champion from 1963 to 1969. When he beat Boris Spassky to defend his world title in 1966, this was the first time a world champion had beaten their closest rival in match play since the nineteenth century. In 1969 Spassky got revenge and Petrosian lost his title. He continued playing though and continued being a very tricky opponent. In total, was a candidate for the World Chess Championship eight times (1953, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1971, 1974, 1977 and 1980) which means that for EVERY SINGLE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP BETWEEN 1953 AnD 1980 Petrosian was either the champion or the candidate!!

He also won the Soviet Championship four times (1959, 1961, 1969, and 1975) which, given the quality of Soviet players at the time, was no mean feat. This was, after all, the age of Tal, Botvinnik, Korchnoi, Spassky, Smyslov, and Keres!

Art Zeller, Paul Keres and Tigran Petrosian with the Piatigorskys at the 1963 Piatigorsky Cup, 1963

He was insanely hard to beat, virtually unplayable at times, using a style heavily influenced by Aron Nimzowitsch's book My System and makes me think particularly of Nimzowitsch's dictum "First restrain, next blockade, lastly destroy." In the Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games, Graham Burgess writes Petrosian invented:

"a unique playing style that oppnonents found very hard to handle. Often it wasn't even clear what they were fighting against, as Petrosian's deep prophylactic play would be preventing ideas that had not even occurred to them. Once his opponent's active possibilities were neutralized, Petrosian would squeeze relentlessly."

To give an example of how difficult an opponent he was, over the ten Olympiads he played in, he had 79 wins, 50 draws, and only 1 loss. In 1969, his final year as World Champion, he didn't lose a single tournament game.

Sam Copeland breaks down one of his best games with Spassky in the video below and you can check out some more of Petrosian's games here.

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Happy birthday Nona Gaprindashvili (1941-)!

Gaprindashvili in 1975. Photo: Dutch National Archive/Wikipedia.

Nona Gaprindashvili is a Georgian chess Grandmaster - the first woman ever to be awarded the title FIDE Grandmaster which she won in 1978, and the fifth women's world champion which she won in 1962 and held for 16 years! Contrary to the claim in The Queen's Gambit Gaprindashvili DID play against men (Gaprindashvili rightly sued and Netflix settled out of court). In fact, she played against three world champions: Mikhail Tal, Boris Spassky, and Viswanathan Anand. One of her best-known games was a win against another man, the German Rudolf Servaty in Dortmund, 1974 which she won in 17 moves (Servaty resigned as it was mate at move 19). Get this: according to this article, Stockfish can't spot Gaprindashvili's game winning 15th move until it's on a depth of about 30 (15 moves per side)!

As a pioneer for women's chess it would be hard to overstate Gaprindashvili's importance. Winning the Women's World Championship in 1962 made her a Georgian celebity. From wikipedia:

"After her victory, Gaprindashvili was a celebrity in Georgia, and crowds gathered to meet her as she returned from the World Championship match. Woman Grandmaster Jennifer Shahade described Gaprindashvili as a symbol of Georgian nationalism and merit during the country's time as a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. Her victory marked the beginning of a "women's chess revolution" in Georgia. Woman Grandmaster Rusudan Goletiani said that this went even further, with her success helping inspire a broader "intellectual revolution" for Georgian women. Many women took up chess afterward, and Georgia became one of the most prominent countries in women's chess, producing numerous masters during Gaprindashvili's career."

In a fascinating statistical analysis of the game's greatest players, GM Larry Kaufman found that Gaprindashvili's chess represented a leap in quality over the previous champion larger than any jump among the top men since Morphy! Kaufman writes:

"It is rather remarkable that the current women's world champion, GM Ju Wenjun, is only 37 Elo stronger by my measure than Gaprindashvili at her peak half a century ago, and that Gaprindashvili at her peak would fall right in the middle of the 2019 Women's Candidates! She was really remarkable for the time, and is still winning Senior Women's titles! In fact, her peak compares with today's top women about the same as Fischer's peak (at the same time!) does with today's top men, i.e. a bit below the current champ but on a par with the Candidates."

Gaprindashvili in Tbilisi in 2015. Photo: Maria Emelianova/Chess.com.

She's still playing - and kicking ass - in seniors tournaments and won the Women's Over-65 World Championship 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2022 (at age 81!).

A true legend of chess. Check out some of her games here.

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BBC News: Tunde Onakoya: Nigerian breaks chess marathon record

BBC News - Tunde Onakoya: Nigerian breaks chess marathon record

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people who don't follow chess I promise this post is really funny

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Kateryna Lagno in her win against Vaishali Rameshbabu in Round 6, of the 2024 Women’s Candidates.

Photo; Michal Walusza

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Aleksandra Goryachkina in her win against Nurgyul Salimova, in the 2024 Women’s Candidates.

After Round 6 she's in second place on 4 points, right behind Tan Zhongyi on 4.5 points. (Can you tell I'm just catching up?)

Photo: Maria Emelianova