A Miscellany

The weird and wild in the world of chess.

Many of you may know more about some or all of the following than I do; if so, please chime in and fill in some details, share your general thoughts, etc.

1. Magnus Carlsen on Joe Rogan’s podcast. I haven’t watched/listened to the whole thing, but I’ve heard numerous clips and they’ve been invariably interesting. (Of course, that’s what you’d expect - there’s a reason they were turned into standalone items, but they were so far above the norm that there’s good reason to think the whole thing will be excellent as well.)

2. Magnus Carlsen not playing in FIDE events? I had seen this somewhere, several weeks ago, as part of the whole feud over whether there could be a Chess960 World Championship not under FIDE’s auspices. But Carlsen played several FIDE-rated games in the Norwegian Team Championship in early March, so I’m not sure one way or another. Was his statement/ultimatum made after those games? Was the threat a mere rumor or trial balloon? Was it genuine but the situation resolved? If you know, please jump in.

3. Hikaru Nakamura thinking of retiring? At one level this is “old news” - he has been saying for a while that he’ll go for one or at most two more Candidates cycles before hanging up his spurs (at least as an OTB player). But my impression of some recent statements he made was that he was taken aback by his play in some games the last month or two to the point where some sort of retirement might be imminent rather than something that could take place in several years. (See here, for instance.) Again, those who have kept more up-to-date on this matter are invited to weigh in.

4. Kirill Shevchenko banned - but for long enough? Fabiano Caruana and Crisian Chirila weigh in on the three/two year ban on former Candidate Kirill Shevchenko for cheating/trying to cheat with a cell phone in a recent event. (Go to the 49:40 mark of this, their latest C-Squared podcast.)

5. Kateryna Lagno withdrew from the last tournament in the FIDE Women’s Grand Prix, which is a qualifier for the Candidates. (That said, she was out of the running for qualification, so it’s not quite the sacrifice one might think.) Why? Because in her last Grand Prix tournament she didn’t win the beauty prize (the award for which was apparently an expensive watch) for her win over Elisabeth Paehtz. (No, really - though this would have been a good post for yesterday.) Her win was entertaining but filled with errors, and passed over in favor of a relatively pedestrian win by Alexandra Kosteniuk against Tan Zhongyi. Lagno believed the committee discriminated against her as a Russian, which wasn’t a strike against Kosteniuk as she switched federations after March 2023 and now represents Switzerland. (She has long had dual citizenship, thanks to her first marriage [long since dissolved] to a Swiss citizen.)

You can read more about this here; then, watch Caruana’s not particularly appreciative assessment of either game starting from the 1:07:45 mark of the same podcast featured in the previous item.