English Chess Forum

Episode 52 is here! We're joined this week by Robin Sarfas, a club player for Hammersmith, who's jumped several hundred rating points during the pandemic. Find out his improvement secret(s), and marvel at our Olympiad knowledge in the quiz...

The brand new Episode 51 is your regular hotchpotch of topics, from the longest possible chess game to the somewhat meta concept of whether you'd prefer to play against yourself with white or black. The quiz is sponsored by Google, and we also wonder how events like Caplin Hastings Online and Wijk a...

We're back in 2021 for Episode 50! This week Jon has raging ennui, Phil is sick of screens, and Chris is all snuggly. Also includes centrist dads, odds chess, and Just War Theory.

David was my captain for a few years up there. A tenacious player who could more than hold his own against 200+ players well into his sixties, but more importantly always the loveliest man in the room. A huge loss to Shropshire chess.

The final episode in our December Interview Season sees us in conversation with New Yorker columnist Rachel Syme ! Rachel's great-grandfather Harold Meyer Phillips was a leading American player and organiser, whose achievements included running the famous 1924 tournament in New York. She tells us ab...

Do you like laboured puns? Yes? Tremendous! You'll love our Christmas special, then. This week we discuss the open letter to lichess, decide who the biggest winners and losers of 2020 are, and the quiz covers 70 years of Christmas music.

For the third bite at our December Interview Season cherry, we invited former junior international and sextech entrepreneur Stephanie Alys on for a natter.

Episode 46 is the second in our December interview season. How does chess processing fit within other creative industries? Can it? Should it? Writer, musician, poet, DJ, campaigner, and human, Chris T-T joins us for a lovely chat about his career and chess interest.

Episode 45 is the first of four interviews we’re doing in December with leading people in their respective fields, who also just happen to be a little chessy. The first one is a cracker as musician and football writer Philippe Auclair joins us for a discussion of chess romance, aesthetics, and part...

Episode 44 sees us salute Magnus Carlsen’s sportsmanship, celebrate inspirational junior coaches, and invent our own novelty chess set!

Available on all podcast platforms. And join our lichess team if you want to take part in our ongoing correspondence game against our listeners.

This week we wonder whether the ongoing chess boom can be sustained, discuss prodigies throughout history, and dispute why some famous cartoon turtles decided to deliver pizza.

The brand new Episode 43 is available on all podcast platforms.

Episode 42 is here! This week we respond to feedback on ‘The Queen’s Gambit’, celebrate Mikhail Tal, and go a little bit Hasselhoff. The Chess Pit is available on all podcast platforms.

We’re planning a Twelve Interviews of Christmas feature, or something maybe a little less ambitious. Who do you think we should try to get?

We've been up all night watching CNN and there's a somewhat political slant to this week's offering. But there's still room for bad Hungarian pronunciations, a geographical analysis of the world's Top 100 women, and more thoughts on 'The Queen's Gambit'. Enjoy!

Episode 40 discusses the sliding scale of activities to do in the rain, the Netflix sensation The Queen's Gambit, and we delve quite literally into the 1953 Zurich tournament book for this week's Christory segment. Enjoy!