English Chess Forum

Would be interesting to hear what other US players like Shankland & Xiong think

Good luck to Lev though, he's been through so much

Pete Doggers

The development teams behind the two most successful and influential open-source chess programs, Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero, have issued statements denouncing the commercial program Fat Fritz 2 and the company Chessbase that is selling the program for 99.90 euros

Dave's among the many excellent people involved in Lancashire chess Dave is a great guy. He was part of the Lancashire Junior team visit to Leningrad back in 1990 with myself, Ben Hague and Paul Heaton. I'm guessing that the latter isn't the singer from The Beautiful South? The Housemartins are fro...

Clubs will depend on venues; leagues probably the Autumn, although some Summer leagues may give it a go?

4NCL is normally early November, then early January & February; it could be an idea to go October, November, then March, April, May, although Easter being a moveable feast is a difficulty I'd agree to some extent with Martin about summer chess, although in actually think in the 4NCL case, the proble...

It also seems inevitable that the planned league restructuring to 12 teams in Division One in 2021-22, 12 teams in Division Two in 2022-3 and Division Three being split into Midland, North & South regional leagues will need to be put back by at least one season. If Nick Burrows prediction of decima...

Israel is a number of weeks ahead of us in vaccinations. It was announced that they are lifting a number of restrictions. Not sure if that applies to International air travel yet but we might see some OTB tournaments being announced over there in the not to distant future. 40th Israel Championships...

Agreed, difficult decisions ahead for those in the 4NCL. The last correspondence to captains presented two options; a 2020-21 season as normal or completing 2019-20 in March-May 2021. As neither of these will now happen we shall have to wait and see if they try to complete 2019-20 over the summer o...

From a selfish perspective yes but also to complete the final five rounds of the season and to avoid an off the board decision of who if anyone gets promoted & relegated, nominated for European places and wins the respective divisions. I'd imagine that will be down to what the participating teams w...

Is the 4NCL plan On-Line Season ends at Season 4? And otb starts in Autumn 2021? I would hope that the priority is still to complete 2019-20 over the board as and when it is possible to host such events. Over the board restarting may not mean the end of the online version. Agree with the second bit...

Pete Doggers

Grenke Bank won the inaugural FIDE Online World Corporate Chess Championship on Sunday. The German team, led by GM Georg Meier, defeated top seed SBER (with GM Ian Nepomniachtchi on top board) in the final's second match

I don't think anyone is alleging that chessbase have done anything that is against the law. But I can empathise with the people who have put huge effort into Leela and Stockfish and are annoyed that their work is being exploited for commercial purposes. Probably also a moment to reflect that anyone...

Paul, I see what you mean. The Iran Judo Federation has been banned by its global sporting body, for similar offences, and CAS heard their appeal a couple of months ago - no result so far. Iran would presumably not have been involved in judo competition at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, had they been hel...

Durham website including picture of Korchnoi simul from 1972