Welcome to February: Potpourri Time

The Tata Steel Challengers, the start of the (confusing!) 2024 Champions Chess Tour, and a short, moving film on Erwin l'Ami. And: Farewell Chess24, plus a couple of ways you can help this blog.

The Tata Steel Masters has finished, and we covered it very closely. The concurrent Tata Steel Challengers, by contrast, was barely covered, but it deserves at least a final accounting. While no players currently rated over 2700 participated, two participants - Anton Korobov and Hans Niemann - have been over 2700 and Salem Saleh was close (2690 at his peak). Eight of the 14 players had ratings over 2600, so while it’s not a Grand Chess Tour-level event, it’s still quite strong, and it has the further significance that its winner qualifies for next year’s Masters event.

This turned out to be 17-year-old Indian GM Leon Luke Mendonca, who nosed out two other teenagers, 16-year-old Marc’Andria Maurizzi of France and 18-year-old Daniel Dardha of Belgium. Maurizzi led much of the way, entering the penultimate round a point ahead of Mendonca and a point and a half ahead of Dardha. Unfortunately for the young Frenchman with the Italian name, he lost to Dardha with White in round 12, while Mendonca won with Black against Salem. In the last round Mendonca won with White against Deshmukh Divya, while Dardha defeated Liam Vrolijk (also with White) while Maurizzi only managed a draw with Black against l’Ami. (That’s not a bad result, just not what he needed.)

Here (with my analysis) are the games I just mentioned, and here are the final standings for the event:

• 1. Mendonca 9.5 (out of 13)

• 2-3. Dardha, Maurizzi 9

• 4-5. L’Ami, Korobov 8.5

• 6. Salem 7.5

• 7-8. Niemann, Santos Latasa 7

• 9-10. Vrolijk, Dronavalli 5.5

• 11. Yilmaz 5

• 12. Divya 4.5

• 13. Beukema 2.5

• 14. Roebers 2

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The chess world keeps on turning, and just three days after the Tata Steel tournaments ended, the first tournament of this year’s Champions Chess League - the Chessable Masters - began. The format was designed by bureaucrats out of Kafka, or maybe Immanuel Kant or G.W. Hegel. The important thing is that no casual fan manages to understand it.

I’m…not going to try, except to say that the non-Armageddon games are played with a 10’+2” time control. What I can tell you is this: on Wednesday, January 31, there was a giant Swiss (202 players, I think), with some significant chunk of these players qualifying into different divisional stages. On Thursday, February 1, the most successful of these players, along with several pre-qualified players, went through a couple of rounds of sort-of knockout matches (I think the losers were sent into a sort of repechage bracket allowing them to work their way back up), and starting today - Friday - the survivors of yesterday’s match are in a (sort-of) final eight that includes three more pre-qualified players. These are the pairings for the (sort-of) quarterfinal matches today:

• Vachier-Lagrave vs. Lazavik (who defeated Hikaru Nakamura 2-0 in the first match on Thursday, and then advanced by drawing all five games against Anish Giri, including the Armageddon game with Black)

• Nepomniachtchi - Martinez (the latter was the sensation of the Swiss, and continued his incredible form yesterday)

• Carlsen - So (bad luck for whichever of the two loses the match at this early stage)

• Fedoseev - Firouzja

Here’s the video coverage of Wednesday’s action, and here’s the Thursday video.

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During at least one of the breaks in the Chessable Masters coverage, there was a short but moving video about Erwin l’Ami. It’s less than two minutes long, but worth your time, especially if you’re familiar with him as a chess player but know little of the man himself.

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A couple of days ago, when I wanted to access the games from the Swiss component of the Chessable Masters, I went to Chess24. That site has always, to my mind, was the best place to watch and download live games. (TWIC is good, but on Chess24 you could see the time used by the players, and they covered practically every event live, including online events.) Unfortunately, I came across a message that said they were closed as of that very date. A pity, but they fell prey to the Magnus Group/Chess.com behemoth. They were bought by the group, and then they were “disappeared”, presumably so that the site wouldn’t cannibalize the Chess.com + Chessable combo. Too bad; it was a far better site for watching live events than Chess.com, whatever the latter’s other virtues.

The “goodbye” is no longer on a Chess24 webpage, but can be found on Chess.com. It’s hilarious. My favorite bit is this:

As most of you probably know, we joined forces with Chess.com at the end of last year. It's been an exciting collaboration, and we've been working closely with the Chess.com team.

Yes, I’m sure it was “exciting” for them to join forces and collaborate for an entire month, so they could close the doors and move a tiny amount of their content over to the Borg. Luckily, we are reassured that they will continue their “top-notch coverage of elite chess” on Twitter (one post this year, but at least it was yesterday, post-January 31), while the link to their “keep[ing] up” on events is a dead one. They also claim that “our most popular chess24 premium series” have been moved over, but my quick check found plenty of very popular opening series that have disappeared. (Even though those series were excellent, I don’t think Chess.com should have worried that they would cannibalize Chessable’s profits. It would seem that they disagree - but I might be misinterpreting their motivation.)

Too bad. Fortunately, the Borg doesn’t own everything yet - just Chess.com, Chessable, and New In Chess. At least there’s still Lichess if you want somewhere else to play; there’s ChessBase, which for now has the best database software and the best non-correspondence chess database (the Mega database, with loads of annotated games); and there’s Tim Harding’s excellent UltraCorr correspondence database (at least as good as ChessBase’s rival product, and a lot cheaper). Another interesting product, which is kind of its own thing, though it may prove to be a rival to ChessBase in at least certain aspects, is Chessify. It’s mostly aimed at professional players (and correspondence players should also take note), as its most notable feature is access to chess engines that can reach up to a screaming 1 billion nodes/second. (The charge for that rate is relatively high, but other ultra-fast speeds that don’t quite reach that insane rate cost less.) [Full disclosure: they’re letting me try this out for free, at least for the time being.]

For chess content - many years’ worth! - there’s ChessLecture.com, for whom I’ve done videos for a long time. Most of the presenters are GMs, so if you’re worried that I’m a little too low-brow you’ll find hundreds - probably by now thousands - of videos by players with the highest title.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into an advertisement for any of these products, including Chessify and Chess Lecture. This is a sort of lament at the increasing stranglehold Chess.com & co. is achieving over the chess market. It’s a good site, but there are other good sites, too, and if they’re buying and killing them it’s a loss for the chess community. Support other sites, too! Fortunately, there are also streamers on Twitch, YouTube and elsewhere - just in time to escape the Borg. Chess.com’s appetite may be voracious, but they’re not going to buy YouTube from Google.

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It’s a long post already, but there are two more topics before I close. One is a question for those of you who use the Leela chess engine. (Everyone else should ignore this and skip to the final item of the post.) How do I know that it’s using my computer’s GPU rather than (only?) its CPUs?

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Okay, last item: I’ve set up this site so that when you subscribe, you can do so for a fee. Why would you do a fool thing like that, when the content is free? For two reasons. First, generosity. I’ve spent an awful lot of time blogging over the past 19 years, and if you’ve benefited from my work it would be an appreciated kindness if you contributed. If you’re not able to, or would prefer not to for whatever reason, that’s fine. You’re still welcome, and I’m glad you’re here! (Please invite others, too.)

The second reason is that I will have some bonus content for those who do choose to be paying subscribers. One possibility - maybe not every week, though I’d like to shoot for that - is to have a short post on some interesting opening line, or to answer questions about how to improve, or to address other questions from my readers. Still another possibility is to do a video series at some point, analogous to those I’ve done for the past few World Championship matches, but for some other event instead - maybe the Candidates tournament in April.

The rate I’m asking for is $8/month - less than the price of a fast-food lunch for a single person these days - or $80/year. (You’re of course welcome to offer more, if you’re feeling especially generous.) I assume it’s pretty easy to go and change your subscription if you’ve already got a freebie, but if not you can cancel the old one and then start again. Thanks!