The latest season of the Bundesliga (the best chess nobody sees) won’t finished, but it may be as good as over after the match between the front-runner SC Viernheim and 16-time champions Baden-Baden. SCV had a slight lead going into their match, but had Baden-Baden won the match they would leapfrogged them into first. Instead, Hikaru Nakamura’s SC Viernheim defeated their rivals, led by Vishy Anand, and from here they should be on their way to victory. Many super-GMs participate in the Bundesliga, and even if you couldn’t care less about any of the teams (and unless you’re German, why would you?) a lot of the world’s top players have participated in this league over the years, so there’s a lot of great chess being played on Bundesliga weekends. I’ve included several games from this past weekend in today’s game file - see below.
A more conventional event that many you will have noticed is the super-tournament that started today/yesterday (Tuesday) in Prague. The three Indian Candidates (Gukesh, Vidit, and Praggnanandhaa) are playing, along with other rising stars Abudsattorov, Maghsoodloo, and Keymer; 2023 Candidate Rapport; and bringing up the rear, rating-wise, are the very strong GMs Navara, Bartel, and Nguyen. Round 1 is in the books, and the games are also included in the game file.
Finally, someone recently sent me this image, a 13th century depiction of a Muslim and a Jew playing chess.
The Muslim, playing White, can force mate. When I initially saw this I assumed that the piece on g7 was a queen and the piece on d8 was a rook. (I had also understood my correspondent to have asserted that White had given mate.) But this didn’t make sense, as it wouldn’t be mate given 13th-century rules. Eventually I overcame my hasty assumptions and recognized that the white piece on g7 is a rook (likewise the black piece on e2) while a black queen is posted on d8. Once I understood that (and with it, realized that the image offered a puzzle, not the final position of the game), it wasn’t difficult to work out the solution as I was familiar with the different rules of the time. (Mostly - see the next paragraph.)
So: to find the intended solution you need to be aware of three differences between 13th century chess and the rules that we use. First, (what we call) queens only move one square diagonally - that’s it. They were pretty lame. Also lame: (what we call) the bishops, which only move two squares diagonally. (Like knights, they can jump over pieces, without capturing them.) Finally, a pawn can only promote to a queen, unfortunately; not to a rook (or any other piece). (That was the “[m]ostly” of the last sentence of the previous paragraph. When I saw that there were two solutions I got suspicious and looked up the 13th century rules for pawn promotion.)
The Bundesliga games, the Prague games, and the puzzle can be replayed here. (The Bundesliga games only have introductory comments, but the remaining entries have more substantive annotations.)