A Wednesday Miscellany

Trouble for Yoo, the Women's Grand Prix, Carlsen vs. the Rest of the World, and playing the (extremely) long game.

(1) Let’s start with the bad news first. You might remember that at last year’s U.S. Championship Christopher Yoo lost his temper after a tough loss to Fabiano Caruana. He tossed his scoresheet, stormed out, and shoved a videographer as he was leaving the playing area. As a result he was kicked out of the tournament and received a one-year ban from the USCF.

This didn’t mean that he was banned from FIDE events more generally, and he recently had an excellent result, winning a strong open tournament in Sardinia a couple of weeks ago with a 2731 TPR. All well and good, but the more important news is rather disappointing if the behavior he is alleged of committing - sexual harassment - actually happened. For now he faces a 60-day suspension while the incident is investigated. More here, including some editorializing.

(2) An event I didn’t cover, except to have a little fun with the latest draw between the Muzychuk sisters, was the final event of the FIDE Women’s Grand Prix. This was a qualifier for the 2026 Women’s Candidates Tournament, and the slot went to Zhu Jiner, just ahead of Anna Muzychuk. They tied for first in the tournament with Muzychuk winning on tiebreaks, but in the overall points race it was Zhu who squeaked ahead by a nose. More on the event and the Grand Prix minutiae here.

(3) Magnus Carlsen vs. the Rest of the World, Freestyle edition. Such events have been popular for a long time, the most famous instance taking place in 1999 when Garry Kasparov took on and defeated a large rest of the world team guided by Etienne Bacrot, Florin Felecan, Irina Krush, and Elisabeth Paehtz. In 2025 it was Carlsen’s turn, albeit in Freestyle (Chess960/Fischerrandom); the game finished in a lively draw. (More here.)

(4) I’ll Mate You…Eventually. In the late edition of last week’s Titled Tuesday Hikaru played a long game. A very long game: 810 or 811 moves - behold. From a competitive standpoint the game ended after 48…Kf6?? 49.Bd5 Qe5 50.Nf3, trapping Black’s queen. As Black was also literally 800 points lower-rated than Nakamura, it would have been a normal thing to resign. Instead, he kept playing, and Nakamura decided that if his opponent didn’t want to give up and be done with the game he’d enjoy it too.

To be honest, I’m in Nakamura’s camp here in a general way. But there’s one very important caveat that prevents me from endorsing it in this specific case: there were 453 other people who had to wait for the nonsense to come to an end. By the way, while this is apparently a record for an “official” tournament game, it’s not the record if one counts casual games, too. How do I know? Because in Nakamura’s shoes a couple of decades ago I decided to drag a game out to 2707 moves (or maybe it was 2717) - I even mentioned this in a verrrrrrry early blog post. The game took a while, more than half an hour (a very long time for a game that started with each player having 10 seconds and getting a one-second increment with every move), but because almost every move made by both sides was pre-moved it wasn’t the sort of ultramarathon one might expect.

Anyway, you can replay Nakamura’s monster game, either here or here.