On June 2, on his 39th birthday, Gata Kamsky defeated Russia's Alexander Morozevich at the FIDE Grand Prix tournament in Thessaloniki, Greece. The U.S. champion took a half point lead into the last round. But last games are often full of tension, the pressure rises and blunders are made. Could...

Magnus Carlsen, the world's top-rated chess player, is expected to win every tournament he enters. The Norway Chess 2013 Super Tournament was tailored for him as a tribute to his previous successes. For the first time, he would compete in his homeland against some of the finest chess players in...

Every few years somebody discovers the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), connects him with chess and quotes him:"While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

Duchamp was exaggerating, but he loved chess and he was a decent player. In three chess olympiads in the 1930s,...

Robert Byrne, a prolific chess writer and one of the strongest U.S. grandmasters, died Friday, April 12, 2013, a few days before his 85th birthday.

He was a World Championship Candidate, U.S. champion and played for the U.S. team in nine chess Olympiads. For 34 years, he wrote an exceptional...

The world's top-rated chess player Magnus Carlsen of Norway qualified from the Candidates tournament in London to challenge the reigning champion Vishy Anand of India in the world championship match in the fall of this year. Carlsen, 22, won in the English capital by a squeaker after a dramatic last...

One day the world's top-rated chess player Magnus Carlsen will sit down and write about his games. This is what the great players do, but not yet. At 21, he is too young to be distracted by that on the way to become the world champion. Energy should go into...

After triumphing in two major tournaments, in London in December and in Wijk aan Zee in January, Magnus Carlsen is a clear favorite to win the eight-player Candidates event in London (March 15-April 1). The world's top-rated player is the only Western-born competitor in the field, all his opponents having...

"It could easily be one of my best games," said the world champion Vishy Anand after he brilliantly defeated the Armenian grandmaster Levon Aronian in the fourth round of the traditional Tata Steel Chess Tournament in the Dutch coastal town of Wijk aan Zee this week. The game would make...

Records are meant to be broken. On Sunday, the Argentinian soccer superstar Lionel Messi broke a 40-year-old record, scoring 86 goals in one season. On Monday, the Norwegian chess superstar Magnus Carlsen, 22, won the London Chess Classic in grand style, breaking Garry Kasparov's 13-year-old rating record by 10 points....

If tricks were not allowed in chess, the game would be boring. For the last two centuries they were the jewels of chess played in European coffee houses and they were in big demand. Kibitzers were looking for razzle-dazzle on the chessboard and the players obliged. And we are still...

A football player survives in the NFL on the average only three years. The careers of top chess players last 25 years or even longer. They can challenge the world's best already as teenagers and can continue for six, seven decades until they turn into ageless warriors. At what point...

It was all about chess at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. on October 20. The Big Chair Chess Club, 20 children and seven adults, came from Anacostia to play against chess enthusiasts of the Cosmos Club. It was a beautiful day, but the chessplayers inside didn't notice. After they...

On Sunday, Armenia won the gold medal at the 40th Chess Olympiad in Istanbul. It is their third Olympic gold overall. They also finished first at the World Team Championship last year in Ningbo, China.

Upon arrival in Yerevan on Monday, the jubilant Armenian...

They could barely reach the other side of the chessboard, but playing against the world's top-rated grandmaster Magnus Carlsen was a thrilling experience for many New York kids.

Carlsen visited New York during the last two weeks in August. He played chess against...

UPDATES APPENDED

Plagiarism was in the news lately and chess has its own champions. They use other people's material without attribution and present it as their own. To put it less elegantly, the offenders blatantly, unscrupulously and dishonestly steal work from other authors. They behave like pirates: rampaging, pillaging and...

Svetozar Gligoric, the legendary Serbian grandmaster, died in Belgrade on August 14 at the age of 89. He was one of the world's leading chess players of the 20th century, a fearless competitor and a true gentleman. His chess career spanned 70 years.

He won 12 championships of Yugoslavia...

Chess is a slow game. Chess players don't move like the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt. They advance to the finish line with a steady, deliberate pace. Chess events take days, weeks and sometimes months to finish. What the best chess players have in common with Bolt is the enormous will...

Top-rated Magnus Carlsen won the 7th Tal Memorial in Moscow, one of the strongest chess tournaments of the year. The Norwegian grandmaster was the only undefeated player in a field of 10 world-class players.

He didn't play for more than four months and it...

"I am relieved," Vishy Anand said shortly after his victory against the challenger, Boris Gelfand of Israel, in the World Chess Championship. "The match was so even."

Played at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow during the last...

They fought gallantly and when it was over on Saturday afternoon, the horse, I'll Have Another, and the chessplayer, Hikaru Nakamura, 24, were declared winners almost at the same time. The comparison between the Preakness Stakes horse race held in Baltimore, Maryland, and the 2012 U.S. Chess Championship in Saint...