#chess world championships

[chessaglow]

3 Fun Facts about Mikhail Chigorin

Chigorin won a 2 game match, played by Telegraph with a time control of three days per move, against Steinitz . The match took place from October 1890 to April 1891.

The strong Russian player Emmanuel Schiffers became Chigorin's teacher early on in his career.

Both of Chigorin's World Championship matches took place in the same city: Havana, Cuba.

[gregorsheart]

Ding Chilling

[p3ld]

I have plans for this AU, yeah yeah, it's still them, maybe you guys don't care about it as much as me (I'm the one who make it after all), but the idea and their dynamic in it really give me alot of ideas, even for Errorcore itself.

[e2pawn]

[kolbiewa]

gift for @p3ld

World Chest Championship AU with Corry and Error Sans is quite inspiring!

tbh i want to see more content on this

[magicalnicole]

Magnus won the rapid portion of Tata Steel India! He hopes to win the blitz portion too

November 15, 2024

[coffeeandinsanityy]

bhaiii gukesh actually fucking won the candidates at the age of fucking 17 are u kidding me😭😭😭 he’s the youngest person in the history of fide to win candidates!! God i feel so proud as an Indian!!! Finally after so many years Ian Nepomniachtchi is not leading the candidates !! Now he just has to defeat the previous world champion Ding Liren and he’d be youngest ever player to actually win the Fide world championship😭😭😭😭 My man is here on a spree of making history 🥹🥹

[chessismyaesthetic]

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.

[chessaglow]

3 Fun Facts about José Raúl Capablanca

He was briefly enrolled at Columbia University, before dropping out to focus on chess.

As part of his travels to the San Sebastian tournament in 1911, Capablanca sailed aboard the Lusitania, the ship which was sunk a few years later during the First World War.

Capablanca lost to a young Mikhail Botvinnik in a simul in 1925

[p3ld]

Yeh no

I can do M3

[sibyl-of-space]

Ok I know probably none of your guys are as plugged in to #chessdrama as I am but like, putting aside Hans's horseshit for 8 seconds, I am SO EXCITED about the championship match upcoming in 2023.

It's like a Hollywood underdog movie come to life.

The chess championship works like this: there is a "candidates tournament" where only a very small handful of the best of the best are invited to participate, and the winner of that candidates tournament is selected to face off against the incumbent grand champion in the championship match.

There are TWO "but"s about it this year.

1) One of the players invited to the candidates tournament, Sergey Karjakin, publicly announced support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. As a result he was banned from FIDE events for a time - therefore disqualifying him from the candidates' tournament. This will be very relevant later.

2) Reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen declined to defend his title. The likeliest reason being that he has held the title since 2013 and has repeatedly shown himself to be on a league of his own, and already defeated this year's winner of the candidates' tournament (Ian Nepomniachtchi) in LAST year's championship match... anyway for whatever reason he will not be participating and will relinquish the title.

So who is the championship match going to be between? The top TWO finalists of the candidates' tournament. The top finisher was also last year's finalist, Ian Nepomniachtchi.

And who finished second place in the candidates' tournament 2022....?

This is where it gets super juicy. The second place finisher was Ding Liren, who was not originally invited to the candidates' tournament, but was a last-minute replacement for the banned Sergey Karjakin!!!

The guy who wasn't originally even in the candidate's tournament now has a shot at the world champion title.* Y'all it's so exciting. I can't fucking wait until April. Like even if Ian wins the title you can't tell me Ding having a seat at that table isn't some chefs kiss shit.

Anyway here's my favorite picture of Ding Liren which I'm pretty sure was a photo op specifically to announce his invitation to the championship match, and you can't say they didn't flex at the opportunity (but I'm also laughing at the not properly buttoned up dress shirt and ill-fitted suit):

This has been your reprieve from chess drama involving Hans. Thank you for your attention

* it should be clarified that Ding Liren is like up there among the highest ranking players EVER, with a batshit impressive resume of his own, hence he was chosen as a replacement (iirc as the highest ranking player not already in the tournament). So it's not like he's some nobody. He is very very much somebody. it's just the circumstances around his candidacy for the championship title this year are so.. DRAMATIC

[edwardsissyhandsthtdanceslikeabb]

ding LI FUCKING REN HOLY MOLEY!???!!

[gregorsheart]

Wow the first game was such a pleasant surprise, I'm rooting for both of the players but I really did not expect DING to WIN with BLACK the FIRST GAME this is going to be veeery interesting.

[galaxacious]

World chess championship on NOW game ONE!!!!!!

(Edit: and you can watch it too! go on youchube n type "chess" into the search bar it'll come up. And Judit Polgar is commentating!!! Judit!!!!! & Daniel Naroditsky as well!)

[dozydawn]

Grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi plays game 12 of the World Chess Championship, 2023.

[chessismyaesthetic]

Happy birthday Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand!

Vishy Anand, one of my favourite commentators from recent World Championships (he just seems like such a lovely guy and his analysis is always interesting and well explained), is an Indian chess grandmaster and a former five-time World Chess Champion. The FIRST grandmaster from India (he won the title in 1988) which is hard to believe given how many great Indian chess players there are now, he has the 8th highest peak FIDE raiting of all time. He remains the only player to have won the World Chess Championship in tournament, match, and knockout format, as well as rapid time controls.

Vishy playing Kasparov, 1995.

As a teenager people called him "Lightning Kid" for his rapid playing speed, and later GMs who faced him often described him as one of the all-time greats alongside Garry Kasparov (a logical comparison given the schism in the World Championship and the fact most top GMs would have played both so could compare).

As a lightning fast teenager in the 1980s.

Wikipedia describes him as "a well-liked figure throughout the chess world for two decades, evidenced by the fact that Kasparov, Kramnik, and Carlsen, all of whom were rivals for the world championship during Anand's career, each aided him in his preparations for the 2010 World Chess Championship" which is something I massively admire in sports people - the seemingly rare ability to be a top competitor AND be nice to people.

Check out his game 6 win against Karpov in the 1998 World Championship match for a great win at an important moment. Karpov had won the first four games, Vishy made a draw in game 5, and NEEDED to win. So what does he do? He plays the Trompowsky Attack (1. d4 Nf6 2. Bg5) - rarely seen at GM level - and wins in 42 moves! Seriously, go google and admire. Sadly (for me at least since I'm a fan) he lost the WC in the tiebreaker games and didn't manage to become World Champion until two years later when he became the first world champion from Asia and the first world champion from outside the ex-Soviet Union since Bobby Fischer.

Anand v. Kramnik at the 2008 World Championship, game 3.

OR check out game 3 of his World Championship match against Kramnik in 2008. Here Vishy has the black pieces playing against Kramnik's Queen's Gambit Declined - they go into a really tactically sharp line known as the Blumenfeld Attack (this is part of the Semi-Slav defence, classical merin variation if you want to look it up). On move 14 Vishy plays a novelty - a new idea - that Kramnik needs to refute if he's to win. Vishy's idea is to just give up a pawn (which is usually defended) in favour of attacking the white king. Two pawns down, Vishy rejects the possibility of a draw and goes on the attack with Kramnik's king on the run. It's exciting stuff and unbelievably tense when you imagine the WC conditions they were playing in!

Vishy about to beat defending champion Magnus Carlsen in Game 3 of the 2014 World Chess Championship in Sochi.

His career is way too long and too well documented to be worth going into any greater detail - google is your friend here - but what a great player. Well worth delving into his games, not least as he was one of the first to embrace computer prep so that alone is an interesting development.