see their Facebook page for more détail and pictures

With the new points race beginning, this was a week that saw a lot of elite players in action, with the notable exceptions of Magnus and Hikaru (who I believe is doing an event).

3 players finishing on 10/11 has to be extremely rare.

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After a great string of tournament successes, Pragg makes it back to top 10.

Wesley So also climbs up to #5 after an eternity.

The 2 Uzbeks still staying strong in top 10.

Arjun hanging in there as usual.

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DcvK6ManTDT/?igsi=MWJqMjR4anBpMGJ0Mw==

Chess ratings are derrived from chessever.com, while population estimates are sourced from https://data.worldbank.org/ .

'm about to play a tournament and tried to prep against a few of my opponents — and I can't find games for most of them, even though they're rated. So frustrating. Turns out it's not really about rating at all, it's whether you happened to be on a top/broadcast board at some point. Everyone else's games just disappear after the event, even though the scoresheets are sitting in a box somewhere with the arbiter.

Does something like this already exist and I just don't know about it? And if it doesn't — why not? Legal/ownership headache with scoresheets, an arbiter/federation thing, or has nobody just tried it? Feels like OCR is good enough now that someone could scan a box of old scoresheets and turn it into PGNs pretty easily. Am I missing something obvious here?

After playing chess my whole life, and after studying playing seriously for 4 years straight. I finally hit the random goal of 99% Percentile!!

The hardest plateau so far has definitely been 1700! I was stuck at there for months.

Don't give up if you're in a plateau !

Edit: How I did it

In 2021 I got bit by the chess bug, I played a lot as a child, so I was already around 1100 elo. But from then I read cover to cover Logical Chess Move by Move by Irving Chernev. That really helped.

I did hundreds of tactics, the right way! Not moving until I could visualize each move.

I played lots of slow classical games online and added them afterwards in lichess study, adding notes after eveymove. This helped me not only see weaknesses in my game, but helped me slowly improve my openings.

I went through: Winning chess Tactics Winning chess Combinations And now I'm working through Winning chess Strategy All by Yasser Seriewan.

And now what really helped me push past the 1700 plateau, blindfold puzzles! Ayden Rayner has a great podcast called Don't Move Until you See it. Has greatly improved my visualization.

Also I have Aphantasia

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Hi everyone,

Two weeks ago I started an experiment: progressively training blindfold chess to see whether it could improve my calculation and tactical vision.

I've been using increasingly difficult visual constraints:

Board freezes → I can only see the board every X moves.

Pieces become checkers-like tokens → I can see the board, but without piece identities.

Pieces disappear → after a certain number of moves, I have to keep track of the position mentally.

The idea is to use the first two as intermediate steps toward full blindfold play, rather than jumping straight into it.

After two weeks, here's where I am:

Board freezes: I'm now at 9 moves out of 10 before seeing the board's actual position again. The progress feels quite noticeable: I'm less lost and the position feels much clearer in my head.

My last game against Stockfish was a good illustration: 92% accuracy and a very controlled win.

Well… I only noticed afterwards that Stockfish was actually set to 700 Elo 😅.

Pieces replaced by tokens: 3 moves out of 4 is still pretty hard. I'm starting to win occasionally against 1300 Elo Stockfish.

Pieces disappearing: 1 move out of 2 now feels quite manageable and I've had several wins. I've started trying 3 moves out of 4, but no wins yet.

Position reconstruction: I started this one this week. A position from a Lichess game is displayed for a few seconds, then I try to reconstruct it on an empty board without looking at the original.

It's difficult… but strangely addictive. 😅

For now I'm using simple positions with 4–8 pieces, and I can reconstruct them correctly roughly 20% of the time.

The goal here is to isolate one particular skill: building a precise mental representation of the board before calculating.

Has it transferred to my regular chess?

At the end of the second week I played two 10-minute games on Chess.com to see whether I could feel any difference.

Two wins, and a new peak of 2044 elo.

But the games themselves tell a more interesting story.

In the first game, I felt pretty much in control. From an equal position, I calculated a fairly complicated line which eventually won me a rook.

The second game was much messier. I made two one-move tactical blunders in the opening, leaving myself in a losing position.

I kept fighting and eventually found a series of sacrifices leading to a nice mating threat that my opponent missed. The sacrifices were also confirmed by the Chess.com analysis afterwards.

Overall, I feel that my tactical vision is getting sharper, and especially that I'm more comfortable calculating complicated lines.

Obviously, two games and two weeks of training are nowhere near enough to conclude that blindfold training caused any improvement in my rating. But it's encouraging enough that I definitely want to keep going.

What I'm trying to achieve

I'm starting to see a logic in the training:

1. Reconstruct positions

→ build a precise mental representation of the board.

1. Play with visual constraints

→ maintain that representation while calculating.

The idea is to work on visualization separately, then put it under pressure during calculation.

Over the next few weeks I'll gradually increase the difficulty: more pieces in the reconstruction exercises and stronger visual constraints.

And I'll keep playing some rapid games to see whether the feeling of improvement persists.

Have any of you tried something similar?

For those who already play blindfold: what does the board actually look like in your head? Is it a fairly precise visual image, or something more abstract? And have you noticed an improvement in your regular chess from practicing blindfold?

The September list is out, and August belonged to Praggnanandhaa. He won the Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz, then tied for first at the Sinquefield Cup and lost the playoff to Wesley So, then came back a week later and won the Grand Chess Tour Finals anyway, beating Keymer in the semi and Caruana in the final. The rating side of all that is quieter than the trophy side: 2761 in classical, which is enough to pass Erigaisi for India's #1 spot by two points, and 2730 in rapid.

So takes nine rating points from the Sinquefield win. Nakamura did not play a rated game all month and is the new USA #1 anyway, because Caruana gave back three in classical. The rest of Saint Louis was expensive: Caruana dropped out of the rapid 2700 club, So lost 19 blitz points across 28 games, and Jorden van Foreest went 2/9 in the Sinquefield Cup (yes, 2/9). Nobody joined or left the classical 2700 club. The most watched chess of the month, Carlsen beating Lazavik in the Esports World Cup final in Paris, was not FIDE-rated.

The girls' junior list turned into a proper race. Modipalli Deekshitha went from 2157 to 2454 in a single list, on two opens in Portugal and Spain, the biggest gain by any woman in the world this cycle. That puts her third among the girls' juniors, and the top four are now inside twelve points: Anastasiia Hnatyshyn, Alua Nurman, Deekshitha and Alice Lee. Lee took second at the Cairns Cup behind Tan Zhongyi with a GM norm, a week after beating Hou Yifan in the Women's Speed Chess final. Nurman, born 2007, is the oldest of the four.

On the boys' side, Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, 15, is still the world junior #1 at 2716, thirteen clear of Gukesh, who sat August out. Aditya Mittal won the Slovak Masters in Skalica on tiebreak from Abhimanyu Mishra and Dardha, in a field that was mostly 2600s. Yahli Sokolovsky of Israel won the European Junior title in Cetinje, and Eline Roebers the girls' title. Vyom Malhotra, born 2014, went 2297 to 2438 in nine games at the Czech Open, with an IM norm along the way.

The strongest fields of the month were not the obvious ones. The Turkish Super League had twenty players rated 2600 or better (I wrote about it last month), the Sinquefield Cup had ten, and eight of the ten at the Rubinstein Memorial in Polanica were, which Awonder Liang won. Etienne Bacrot won a record ninth French title, beating Lagarde in the final. Alan Pichot won the Spanish title, and Jaime Santos Latasa won both the Spanish blitz and the Spanish rapid in the same weekend. Shreyas Royal, 17, won the British Championship ahead of McShane and Adams, the youngest British champion there has ever been, and in the same hall Bodhana Sivanandan took the women's title at 11. Elham Amar took the Sparkassen Trophy in Dortmund and Jakhongir Vakhidov won the Abu Dhabi Masters.

Events that finished in August produced 19 GM norms and 99 IM norms, plus 17 women's norms. Or Bronstein had the summer of his life, winning the Arad Open and finishing second on tiebreak at Kanizsa, behind Pranesh; he is over 2500 for the first time and has three GM norms on FIDE's register. Anatole Vlachos also has his three, at 2504. Khagan Ahmad, 15, crossed 2500 with his first GM norm from the Turkish league. Felix-Antonio Ilinca, born 2010, and Svyatoslav Bazakutsa are one norm away.

Ten federations have a new classical #1. Pavel Eljanov is Ukraine's again. Poh Yu Tian, born 2009, hit 2500 on the nose with a GM norm in Dortmund and now leads Malaysia. Kukudzarema Shepherd is Zimbabwe's #1 on the published list after a +186 August. Another ten women's #1 spots changed hands; Armenia's went back to Elina Danielian, born 1978.

Alireza Firouzja finished level on points with the winner Mamedov in the Balkan rapid championship in Sofia on the last weekend of August, then won the blitz outright the next day. None of it is in the September numbers yet. Neither is the Sants Open in Barcelona, where two Indians born in 2012, Shaurya Chaudhary and Aarav Amonkar, gained 189 and 157 points and are now 2419 and 2400 live, or the Slovak Open, the open section of the Skalica festival Mittal won, where Zsombor Pasti of Hungary, born 2009, picked up 108.

48,897 people played a classical game this cycle, 36,663 played rapid and 24,290 played blitz. Behind Deekshitha, the biggest classical gain by anyone over 2300 was Vedant Varasada, born 2010, +231 to 2464. Gleb Scheglov, born 2010, led rapid with +152 to 2364, and Martin Krauchi Romero of Spain, born 2011, led blitz with +176 to 2366.

The waiting time for an opponent is too long with the 10+5 time control, compared to the 15+10. I like to play longer time controls with increment, but sometimes 15+10 is too much of a time commitment.

I was generating some endgame statistics for my website and found some interesting findings I'd like to share based upon both type of pieces remaining and the ELO of the players using the pieces.

If you start at the top of the ELO range, 2700 and above, and just look at which endings hold. Of course opposite bishops are at the top, but double rook endings are second and are drawier at 78.7% than single rook endgames 72.8%, so trading one pair off in general makes the ending more decisive rather than less. Also a close 3rd was same-colour bishops which come out drawn 76.3% of the time which is actually ahead of pure rook endings at 72.8%, which is not what I would have expected. Also a pure minor piece ending (any minor v minor combo) sits at 70.7%, while rook and minor against rook and minor is 59.4% so it seems important to keep the rooks on for extra attacking potential in this instance.

Then the performance of endgames by ratings, which is where it got interesting. Unsurprisingly, endgames in general get more drawish as the players get stronger. But breaking it down by piece type lets you see where the differences really lie.

At 2200 for instance endgame draw rates for pure endgames: Pawn only 52.1%, knight 52.1%, queen 52.5%. However at 2700 those same three read 72.7%, 60.0% and 59.3%. Thats up to a 20% increased draw rate for these endings specifically.

Of course every ending on the list gains draw rate as ELO increases, so part of this is the general drift upward. But the spread is not that. Pawn endings, same-colour bishops, double rook and pure rook all pick up seventeen to twenty-two points between the two bands. While down the other end, queen, knight, heavy pieces and bishop against knight pick up a "mere" seven to ten percentage points.

The cleanest numbers are probably the single rook endgame which are far more likely to draw at higher ELO. These endings gain 19.2 percentage points from 2200 to 2700. I didnt expect there to be such a discrepancy for an ending as fundamental as rook v rook.

None of these to my cursory glance seem prone to sample size bias but a limitation I've identified is that a game can also land in more than one row. For example, a game where there was a trade of minor pieces out of a rook-and-minor ending into a pure rook endgame gets counted in each row. I dont think this impacts the findings however.

All of these games are sourced from year 2020 onward, classical games, both players inside the ELO band, and data points are defined irrespective of any material advantage heading into the endgame.

Thoughts?

This actually happened a couple of years ago. I had this delivery route in a box truck that was going to take a while. We left the depot at 5:00 and I was with a trainee driver so I thought great, I will get a chance to play some chess on my phone while I'm in the passenger seat. I had a few games during this ride, nothing unusual but I was losing most of them because I was sleepy and didn't eat much.

We crossed the state line around 9:30 and arrived at the first of our 17 stops at about 9:45. I went into receiving and saw the clerk was a guy who only speaks Korean so I went back to the truck to tell the trainee to go in and talk to him (I don't speak Korean). I started to unload and the clerk started yelling something so I said what's up and it appeared that the wrong product was loaded on our truck. It was supposed to be pallets of Bohae Bokbunja but instead we had pallets of Bohae matchsoon. So they were rejecting the whole order which was annoying because it meant this load would be obstructing us in the truck for the rest of the day and adding weight which would make us slower.

We left there and continued on and after lunch I started feeling better so I queued up a blitz game since our next stop was 45 minutes away. I lost it and the most of my games that day because I was so distracted. The day was dragging and everything was taking forever because of the wind and our stupid uneven load. Some city traffic and icy roads also set us behind. We didn't end up getting to our last stop until around 19:30 and then it's about a 4 hour drive back to the depot.

I asked the trainee if we were OK on fuel still and he said yes but I didn't know he mistakenly looked at the DEF gauge instead of the fuel gauge. We ended up almost running out of fuel but barely making it to a fuel station in the middle of nowhere. The pump was slow as hell and I was cold and hungry again. We took turns driving on the way back and when we were about 15 minutes away...

I queued up for a 5+0 game on my phone. I found one and my opponent had a "GM" thing next to his name and the flag on his profile was UAE. I don't know anything about UAE players so I have no idea who this is.

I had the white pieces so I played 1.e4 and I'd just lost to a different player twice in a row earlier that day who played French defense. It was bugging me and so my brain was stuck thinking of French so I impulsively pre moved 2.d4.. only problem was this guy didn't play French, he had played 1...c5 so after I realized my mistake I said "oh shit" out loud which startled the trainee.

Oh well, another loss. Guess I'd have to go home and sleep and try again tomorrow. He took 2..cxd4 and after 3.c3 I was shocked that he played dxc3. After 4.Nxc3 e6 5.Nf3 a6 I realized that this dude is playing a Kan setup which isn't supposed to be ideal against this gambit but I think that it's still OK for black.

He followed up with the expected 7...b5 8.Bb3 Bb7 and then I remembered that I'm supposed to find the move 9.a4 here. He played 9...b4 10.Nd5 d6? and I wasn't too familiar with this idea.

I didn't know what to do so I opted for 11.Be3 and black snapped off my knights on d5 11...exd5. He waited until the e-file was blocked with my bishop to take the free piece. Rude!

So after 12.exd5 (at least I get a pawn back) Nce7 13.Re1 Nf6 it started to feel like he's getting away with this. In fact only one move promises a winning advantage for white here.

14.a5 Bxd5 15.Ba5+ Nd7 16.Bb6 Bxf3 17.Qxf3 and black resigned!

I figured maybe it was a weird hour of the day in UAE and maybe he was distracted by stuff too but I don't think he was on a dark frozen highway, going 75mph in a crappy old box truck at the end of a 17-hour work day.

Another puzzle from one of my games. This one I played less than half an hour ago. It's White to play and win. Find the right moves and Black gets absolutely annihilated.

Honestly, I'm a really sore loser. When I lose, I get really frustrated and it discourages me a lot. I know I have to suck it up and learn to play better, stop being sad because I lost since it's going to happen many times, etc. But idk, it's not that easy for me to just get over the frustration.

Was anyone else like this in chess and can help me with this?

It seems like 1/3rd of my games where I start as white, the opponent instantly aborts the game if I play D4. Do people really hate that opening or something?

(Me and my opponents are like 1300-1400. But it happened at 1100 and 1200 too)

I’ve been trying to figure out where most of my blunders come from, and they seem to fall into these two categories.

The more common one is I miss things within a variation, a resource my opponent has that I didn’t see. Usually it’s because I calculated a line but didn’t accurately visualize the position somewhere throughout the variation, and that leads me to missing something my opponent has.

There’s the saying “Long variation, wrong variation.” Sometimes I take that to heart and try not to calculate super long lines, but sometimes I’ll analyze master games and there are long variations that win for someone, and they find it! Obviously that person was right for calculating some long line that wins for them. So it’s not like a rule to follow.

Which do you feel happens to you more?

The actual match starts around 39:00

By Leonid Kubbel

source https://www.perpetualcheck.com/perf/index.php?lan=us&fed=all&t=standard&g=m&y=1 (I would have liked to use the internet archive for that, but it doesn't work on my side)

It is not my website and I am not sure what is happening with Ishmukhametov (that player went recently 11/11 in their last tournament)

It is interesting to see how solid Sindarov is, since the performance is based on 63 games

E: the pic didn't attach, well...

By Leonid Kubbel. Who would have thought a stalemate would be possible

Folks, how exactly are we to add stockfish as an engine for CB 26? Every helpfile I can find talks about using the 'add UCI engine' button but I cannot find that option to save my life.

Thanks for any help.

I didn't find it :-(

I saw the sequence that was played in game and it's bad for both black and white