Chess News

1. European Club Cup - Live!
   The European Club Cup is taking place on 17-23 October in Budva, Montenegro, bringing together 108 teams in the open section and 22 teams in the women's competition. The seven-round event features a number of elite players, including Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Wei Yi, Alexandra Goryachkina and Humpy Koneru. | Follow the action live with expert commentary starting at 14.00 CEST (8.00 ET, 17.30 IST) | Pictured: Nino Batsiashvili | Photo: Gerd Densing
2. Vahap Sanal and Team Türkiye triumph at NATO Chess Championship
   Vahap Şanal won the 2026 NATO Chess Championship in Jūrmala with a perfect 7/7 score, while Türkiye took first place in the team competition. Slovenia's Laura Unuk finished second overall and was the event's top woman, with Germany's Robert Stein claiming bronze on tiebreaks. The championship brought together 148 military players from 18 NATO countries and also featured a blitz event won by Dutch IM Mark Timmermans. | Photo: Vladimir Lionter / @the_lionter
3. FIDE President Timur Turlov meets Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides in Nicosia
   FIDE President Timur Turlov met Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides in Nicosia to discuss the country's growing chess infrastructure and future cooperation with FIDE. Cyprus has hosted several major international events in recent years while also expanding domestic tournaments, youth training and permanent facilities. The meeting highlighted the island's development as an emerging European chess centre and its potential as a model for combining elite events with long-term national growth. | Photo: FIDE
4. US Championships - Live!
   The US Championships are taking place on 9-21 October at the Saint Louis Chess Club. Each tournament is a 12-player single round-robin with a classical time control. Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So and Levon Aronian are the highest-rated players in the open, while Carissa Yip, Alice Lee and Irina Krush head the women's field. | Follow the action live starting at 19.00 CEST (13.00 ET, 22.30 IST) | Pictured: Anna Zatonskih | Photo: Crystal Fuller
5. European Club Cup: Favourites set for direct encounters
   Eleven teams remain tied for first place in the open section of the European Club Cup after three rounds, with tenth seeds Beer Sheva the only top-twelve team to have dropped a match point. The fourth round will see SuperChess facing Bayegan Pendik, with a potential battle between Anish Giri and Nodirbek Abdusattorov (pictured) on the top board. In the women's competition, Monte-Carlo and Gambit Bonnevoie are the only teams with perfect scores and will meet on Tuesday. | Photo: Gerd Densing
6. From quitting chess to becoming a Grandmaster - Interview with Arturs Neiksans
   GM Arturs Neiksans looks back on his remarkable chess journey, from growing up in the small Latvian town of Valka and discovering chess at age nine to representing Latvia and eventually becoming a Grandmaster. He explains why he stepped away from competitive chess, how a career detour ultimately brought him back to the game, and how coaching, streaming and commentary became increasingly important parts of his life.
7. European Club Cup: Crowded at the top
   A total of 108 teams are competing in the European Club Cup in Budva in the open section, with 22 in the women's competition. On paper, the favourites in the open are Bayegan Pendik Chess Sports Club from Turkey, with an average Elo rating of 2715. Bayegan are also the only team with an average rating of 2700 or higher, although four other teams - Alkaloid, SuperChess Romania, Novy Bor and Tuxena - have averages of at least 2600. These five teams are also among the 25 in Budva that have won both their matches in the first two rounds. | Pictured: Alkaloid's Wei Yi | Photo: Gerd Densing
8. Total Chess proposes unified rating system
   Total Chess has proposed a new rating system that combines players' classical, rapid and blitz ratings into a single figure. Developed by researcher Mehmet Mars Seven in collaboration with Norway Chess, the formula uses existing FIDE ratings to assess overall playing strength across the three formats. Magnus Carlsen (pictured) tops the inaugural ranking, followed by Hikaru Nakamura and Nodirbek Abdusattorov. The system will undergo testing and public consultation before potential revisions. | Photo: Nils Rohde / ChessBase
9. US Championships: So wins again, now a full point ahead
   Wesley So defeated Andy Woodward in round eight of the US Championship to extend his lead to a full point over Fabiano Caruana, who drew against Sam Sevian. The two will meet in Monday's ninth round. In the women's tournament, Alice Lee and Rachael Li remain tied for first place on 6/8, while Thalia Cervantes moved within half a point of the leaders by defeating four-time national champion Carissa Yip. | Photo: Lennart Ootes / Saint Louis Chess Club
10. The hour of the seconds
    The World Championship match between Gukesh Dommaraju and Javokhir Sindarov is approaching. The contest gets underway on 24 November in Cologny, near Geneva. Who will be helping the two contenders this time? Sindarov will be able to count on the assistance of his compatriot Abdusattorov, among others, as Abdusattorov himself recently revealed. | Photo: UzChess / Yoav Nis
11. European Club Cup: Comfortable wins for the favourites
    The European Club Cup began on Saturday in Budva, Montenegro, with 108 teams competing in the open section and 22 in the women's tournament. The leading clubs secured comfortable victories, although there were a couple of individual upsets. Defending champions SuperChess Romania and Monte-Carlo both started with wins, while Novy Bor's Nils Grandelius suffered a surprising defeat against Serbian CM Slobodan Filipovic. The women's competition saw seventh seeds Crvena Zvezda held to a draw. | Pictured: Alkaloid's Arjun Erigaisi | Photo: Mark Livshitz / ECU
12. My 70th Memorable Game
    On 17th October 1956, a sensational sacrificial game played in New York City by a 13-year-old chess upstart from Brooklyn shot across the globe. It was a game that literally took the chess world by storm. It contains a stunning sacrificial onslaught and is regarded as one of the most famous games of chess that has ever been played. In the October issue of CHESS magazine John Henderson recalls the game that made 13-year-old Bobby Fischer famous. It was played seventy years ago, today.
13. ChessBase´26 – Tips for Beginners, part 32: Training with style
    It’s once again time to think about aesthetics in ChessBase´26 training: Have you ever noticed the “Style” option? If not, in this episode we’ll explain briefly and concisely how you can better adapt your screen display to your own taste.
14. 25 years ago  –  ChessBase news
    "Yesterday, in one of the most horrifying terrorist atrocities in history, the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed..." Those were the words with which we launched our brand new database-driven news page, on September 12, 2001. It was the very first report we filed. It had a special meaning for the world – but also for chess. Exactly six years earlier the World Chess Championship had been staged on the Observation Deck on the 107th floor.
15. ChessBase´26 – Tips for Beginners, part 30: Use "Folders"
    ChessBase´26 is amazingly versatile and often surprisingly user-friendly — as the first 29 parts of this tutorial series have already shown! One particularly important feature in this context is the “Folders” window, which lets you quickly locate anything you want to use within your storage directories. In this episode, we’ll show you how to activate the window (in case it’s been disabled) and what you can view and work with there.
16. Fridrik Olafsson Memorial
    Chess players, mark your calendars. The Icelandic Chess Federation, Goðinn Chess Club, and Reykjavík Chess Club are joining forces to present "Town and Country" – two spectacular tournaments that together offer 15 rounds of high-level chess in just 11 days, set against two of Iceland’s most contrasting backdrops. It all begins on Thursday, 19 November at 19:00. On Tuesday, 24 November, the Friðrik Ólafsson Memorial Tournament opens – honouring Iceland’s first grandmaster.
17. Hassabis on chess and AI
    In a 15-minute video, Demis Hassabis, one of the central scientists working on artificial intelligence, tells us why he worries about AI going rogue. Hassabis, head of Google AI research, is a very strong chess player who created Alpha zero, the first neural network program on which all modern chess engines are based. It is his vivid description of how AI handled chess that will be of particular interest to the readers of our news page.
18. Quo vadis, Fischer Random Chess? (1)
    As you have noticed, this form of chess is becoming increasingly popular. Everyone seems to like it, sponsors are lining up to stage high-prize tournaments, even World Championships. In this series we look back at the origin of Fischer-Random, Chess960 or Freestyle, as it is now called, and discuss the reasons for its popularity. In the end we will propose some modifications to the rules and how the game should be played. Stay tuned.
19. Sinquefield Cup Tiebreaks - Live!
    The Sinquefield Cup is taking place on 10-20 August at the Saint Louis Chess Club. It is a 10-player single round-robin with a classical time control. Besides battling for a share of the $475,000 prize fund, players battle to get one of the four spots in the upcoming Grand Chess Tour Finals. Follow the games live starting at 19.00 CEST (13.00 ET, 22.30 IST) | Photo: Lennart Ootes
20. Andrew Martin: Evans & Friends Vol.1 & 2
    IM Andrew Martin presents a complete White repertoire after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3, with the Evans Gambit as its aggressive centerpiece for tactically minded players up to around 1800 Elo. Volume 1 covers the key lines, attacking ideas and traps of the Evans Gambit, while Volume 2 provides practical answers to the Petroff, Philidor, Two Knights Defense, Hungarian Defense and several sharp gambits and traps. The aim is a ready to play repertoire that seizes the initiative early, sharpens tactical vision and puts Black under pressure from the very first moves.
21. Remembering Oleg Skvortsov
    A few weeks ago this great chess organiser and sponsor passed away at the age of 57. For many years he invited us to his "Zurich Chess Challenge", which saw some of the world's top players competing. During that time we had interesting, personal interaction with him. For us news of his passing came out of the blue, and it left us deeply saddened.
22. Help us build the next ChessBase
    We're planning the next chapters of ChessBase and we want input from the people who actually use it, before we decide what to build first. Help us by taking part in a survey that asks how you work day to day: your setup and hardware, how you use engines and databases, and which parts of the interface help or get in your way. Filling out the survey takes around three minutes. If you fill it out we will send you a thank-you voucher gift.
23. Shifts and mirrors in a chess problem
    A year ago problem composer Werner Keym issued a challenge: compose a study in which White is winning – but one that can be shifted and mirrored vertically and horizontally, with all vertically shifted and mirrored positions drawing, and all horizontally shifted and mirrored positions losing. Here is the elegant solution, which reminds us of the famous Babson task.
24. How much faster are computers today?
    In the early 1980s, as a fledgling TV journalist, I did a report on the fastest computer in the world. The Cray-1 cost eight million dollars and could do 130 million floating point operations per second. That was enough to calculate the weather, but also to win two consecutive world computer chess championships. How much faster are today's supercomputers? Take a guess – you are definitely not going to get it right.
25. Biel Festival - Live!
    The Biel International Chess Festival is taking place on 11-24 July. Following the Chess960 tournament on Saturday and the rapid chess stage on Sunday, the players in the Masters and Generations Challenge Triathlon face off in the final stage of the classical section on 21-23 July. | Follow the games live starting at 14.00 CEST (8.00 ET, 17.30 IST) | Photo: Biel Chess Festival