English Chess Forum

David Howell on the chess24 commentary team today.

Following the IOC's decision to postpone the Tokyo olympics, FIDE has fallen into line: https://fide.com/news/460 The Chess Olympiad will be held in August 2021 in the same venues (Moscow and Khanty-Mansiysk). The problem for FIDE is the knock-on effect for the World Championship cycle which is not ...

Further to my post last night, a friend has pointed out that the term English Opening was already used in 1876, e.g., in the May number of the Westminster Papers in respect of a game Potter-MacDonnell. (I was working back from the 1882 edition of Cook's Synopsis which is the earliest mention I have ...

Ding rejected Q exchange at move 31 (must have thought the endgame bad) but now chess24's online Stockfish is saying he's dead lost. Time will tell.

Queens off in MVL's game. Wang may win this.

After about two hours: Grischuk v Caruana: Archangelsk Spanish; Caruana accepts a pawn sac, keeps blitzing out his moves to move 22 at least. Time trouble likely for the Russian; position objectively equal maybe. Alekseenko v Giri: Italian Game with d3 and c3, developing slowly, about equal after 12...

The 1843 match between Staunton and Saint-Amant has six games where Staunton opened 1.c4. That might be the origin. This is the view of Modern Chess Openings 10th edition (1965): ..derives its name from its association with Howard Staunton who played it against St Amant in their match (1843) and ag...

Thanks for the link; they forgot to update https://www.englishchess.org.uk/english ... pionships/ and posted a different page instead, a bit silly really?
I will update my website later today.

I am assuming the English Seniors at the end of April is an absolute certainty to be cancelled. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51895873 This event is still not announced as cancelled: why not? https://www.englishchess.org.uk/english-seniors-championships/ The European Individual Senior Championships...

Thanks John for letting us know TWIC seems to be down again? I get the following: Not Found The requested URL /suspended.page/disabled.cgi/www.markcrowther.com was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the reques...

I am assuming the English Seniors at the end of April is an absolute certainty to be cancelled. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51895873 I would also expect it to be cancelled though when I looked yesterday there were 10 entries for the 50+ and 18 for the 65+. The European Senior Individuals in Polan...

Pete Doggers preview First round is Tuesday, I think it is 1 pm UK time Actually the start (going by chess24) is 11am GMT I think, though I am not sure if the 5-hour difference remains throughout. Does Russia implement a clock change, and on the same date as western Europe? On chess24's countdown i...

Even more drastic measures being taken in Norway. The Republic of Ireland health minister announced this afternoon that all pubs and bars will close from this evening until at least 29 March. Some will probably never reopen. If there isn't compliance, emergency legislation will be passed, I think. ...

I am not sure what else we expected from a politician who, generally in life, is pro-risk ... Maybe Johnson and Cummings should recklessly go out and catch it, then we might be rid of them. Same goes for that Prof Vallance or whatever his name is who has fed them this dangerous "herd immunity" theo...

I'm only throwing it in because I don't know the answer, but excluding simuls, who was the first amateur player or untitled player if you like, or someone unknown to beat the official world champion of the day? That is... a very difficult question to answer for a number of reasons. (For example, "u...

The official website at https://fide.com/news/347 still lists Radjabov instead of MVL. This hardly inspires confidence.