CHESS #1408

Magnus Carlsen won the Chessable by beating Anish Giri in the Finals. This was the third event of the Carlsen tour and the world champion has won two of them. It wasn’t a walkover because Giri had his chances but Carlsen won comfortably. Incidentally Giri and Carlsen have a hilarious long-running banter session on Twitter, which often leads to several other top players joining in on the fun.

In the women’s speed championship, Vaishali made the quarters in the second leg, beating Anna Muzychuk along the way, before she lost to Valentina Gunina. Koneru Humpy and Harika made the quarters in the third leg, before losing to Alexandra Kosteniuk and Hou Yifan respectively. This is a format that suits Vaishali but it was Humpy’s first online event post-pandemic so she may have had adjustment issues.

The Indian online Olympiad team is Viswanathan Anand, Vidit Gujrathi, Humpy, Harika, Nihal Sarin and Divya Deshmukh. However, there was a controversy brewing around this with GM R B Ramesh resigning as chief selector from the three-person selection committee as the All India Chess Federation’s power struggle spilled into the playing arena.

The last election of the AICF didn’t happen and there are two factions claiming to run the federation. Ramesh is the first prominent name caught in the crossfire going on for months. He’s probably India’s best-known coach since his Gurukul Academy trains almost all the prominent Chennai youngsters.

Game Changer, the definitive description of the Alphazero algorithm by Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan, has just won the Averbakh-Boleslavsky Award as the best book of 2019. It’s a brilliant book about the DeepMind program that stunned the chess world and set new standards. Alphazero sparked off LeelaChess, which was a collaborative effort at developing a similar self-learning engine that works on Monte Carlo principles. Leela in turn inspired Fat Fritz, which tries to combine self-learning with some guidance.

The Diagram, White to Play (White: Leela Vs Black Stockfish, Game 65, TCEC Superfinals 2020) is an example of Leela’s creativity. White played the amazing 21. Qxb4!! Bxb4 22. axb4 f5 23. Nf6+ Kh8 24. Rxd4 Rc7 25. Red1 Re7.

White is a queen down but with an unshakeable bind. Leela won after 26. b5 b6 27. Kh2 Rb7 28. Ng5 Qc8 29. R1d2 Rc7 30. Rd6 Rb7 31. R2d4 Rc7 32. Rd1 Rb7 33. R6d4 Rc7 34. f4 Rb7 35. Nxe6! Rxe6 36. Nxd7 Kg8 37. Nf6+ Kf7 38. Rd8 Qc5 39. Nxh7 Re8 40. e6+ Rxe6 41. Ng5+ Kf6 42. Rf8+ Qxf8 43. Bxf8 Rc7 44. Rd4 Rb7 45. Kg3 Rc7 46. Rd3 Rb7 47. Kh4 Rc7 48. Kg3 Rc4 49. Rd7 Re3+ 50. Kf2 Rxf4+ 51. Kxe3 Ra4 52. Be7+ Ke5 53. Kf3 (1-0).

Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess and correspondence chess player