English Chess Forum

Richard says it all perfectly. It is a tribute to Nick's courage that he carried on playing chess online as if nothing was wrong, and never made a fuss. Rest in peace, Nick.

An unfortunate mouseslip for Kasparov against Caruana in round 4. Strange to explain as mouse slip, though. What was the intended move if it was a mouse slip? The only explanation is clicking on the wrong piece (queen rather than bishop), dragging it accidentally and then letting go of it. That wou...

Are the players allowed to see the other games? In 960 especially, it might be worth sacrificing a few minutes to see how others are handling the early opening. In OTB chess, an arbiter would take steps to prevent this happening if he/she saw a player copying another game.

It niggles me when people (especially in writing) use "prevaricate" as a synonym for "procrastinate". "Snuck" instead of "sneaked" has snuck/sneaked its way into everyday use, also to my annoyance.

India appealing against the result in the final because of the disconnection. Given the Armenia result in the semi-final, hard to see India's appeal getting anywhere.

I posted that clip from Airplane! where Johnny pulls the plug feeding the airfield lights at a critical moment and then re-inserts with a "Just kidding" throwaway line, but then I thought someone might have a sense of humour failure and take it as a serious suggestion of skullduggery.

I renewed today, although if I were being completely dispassionate and objective, I do wonder why I felt a duty and obligation to do so. I acknowledge and appreciate the efforts and enthusiasm of individuals (especially the volunteers), but there is a voice in my mind which asks what the ECF is for ...

Carlsen loses the first game of the second set. Nakamura's prep seems to be better even though Carlsen was bashing out his moves. Suddenly Carlsen took almost 10 minutes on one move and clearly things had gone wrong. Good game to watch once they were out of computer preparation. Very impressive mid...

I don't like criticising presenters, and I am sure he does not do it intentionally, but I find one commentator's habit of prefacing many of his contributions with an excited "Wow!" (rarely warranted by the move made or the analysis) irritating to the extent where I have to mute the sound.

Justin, I think this discussion has moved away from the original point (and indeed subsequent points) and continuing it is not serving any useful purpose, so I shall try to step back.

Thanks to those like Paul and Adam who are floating initiatives of this kind. My views are similar to Richard Bates's, except that as time goes on, I think there will be considerably more interest. I don't want to spark more discussion about the rights and wrongs of particular strategies, but the mu...

Are we the only country who is actively not interested in testing anyone who does not apparently need hospitalisation? I am interested in knowing how that one can be defended, it seems to baffle experts and non-experts alike This is discussed in the first question here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av...

the government strategy to date has been cogent and logical It may have been logical: it has not been particularly cogent. So for instance : The UK only realised "in the last few days" that attempts to "mitigate" the impact of the coronavirus pandemic would not work, and that it needed to shift to ...

ooks like Boris has finally pressed the red button It's impossble to overstate how utterly shambolic has been the Government's performance here. Prof Chris Whiity, in whom hitherto I would have had the highest imaginable confidence, has gone from telling us (Thursday) that the single focus of polic...

I think suspending chess competitions has become inevitable, whatever we each think of the objective worth of so doing in terms of effective action against Covid-19, so we might as well get on with it straight away. Suspending social media might (arguably) be a more useful action. Some of the tone a...