Paul Morphy News Today

MegaBase 2024 is Chess History in action. Regularly updated every month, the Main Database currently offers 10.6 million games, many of them annotated. In the first part of his review he dealt with the treatment of chess in the 21st Century <a href="https://en.chessbase.com/post/megabase-2024-review-nagesh-havanur">in the MegaBase</a>. Here he offers a rare discovery from a world championship match that fell into oblivion.

Indians took to modern chess as a serious discipline only after Independence, but the country now looks poised to emerge as the next chess superpower

Nowadays you can easily download chess engines that play better than Carlsen, Caruana, Keymer or Nakamura. But if you feel like it, you can also try to program them yourself. Roger Lorenz has tried it. In one weekend - and with the help of ChatGPT. | Photo: Coding robot (image created with Automatic1111 and Stable Diffusion)

Grandmaster Kevin Goh Wei Ming is both the CEO of the Singapore Chess Federation and an 8-time national champion at the Southeast Asian city-state. Kevin recently shared a post on X, showing his experience teaching chess at the Singapore Prison Services. IM Sagar Shah interviewed him on the topic. “Most importantly, chess has brought joy to [the inmates] in a way that perhaps serious, competitive players may never understand”. | Photos: <a href="https://twitter.com/kevingohwm"&g...

Well, stand your butt up then." "You stand your butt up, big guy." That actual exchange from an actual recent Senate hearing may have been less than edifying, but it did get us thinking about the stark decline in that ultimate in mano a mano chess, the challenge match between two consenting chessplayers.

Baskaran Adhiban had quite a rough start in the FIDE Grand Swiss, but that did not prevent him from returning to his trademark creative style in round six against Eduardo Iturrizaga. We don’t want to give too many spoilers, but Paul Morphy would have been proud! In Game of the Week #594, Merijn Van Delft takes a closer look at this encounter. | Merijn’s show is available on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can <a href="https://account.chessbase.com/en/create-account"...

Albin's Counter Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4 e5) has been, and still is, a rare guest at top level tournaments, and is hardly ever seen in the practice of the world champions. The variation is considered theoretically dubious and as an overly aggressive attempt to gain counterplay in the rather solid Queen's Gambit. However, the opening has found its way into literature - in the novel "Gambit" by American crime writer Rex Stout.

One of my best purchases was an E-ZPass, a transponder mounted on my front windshield allowing me to breeze through toll stations by using electronic payment.

Nuremberg 1896 was one of the several super-tournaments in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Coming as it did when the world crown was perceived to be hanging precariously on Emanuel Lasker’s head, the tournament presented a stern test to Lasker himself and all the other world title contenders. It is fitting to revisit the tournament on its 127th anniversary.

150 years ago, from 21 June to 29 August 1873, the “First International Vienna Chess Congress” was held in Vienna. Some of the best players in the world accepted the invitation and played mini-matches against each other. In the end, Wilhelm Steinitz and Joseph Blackburne tied for first place. A play-off match decided the tournament’s winner.