Recap of games 3, 4 and 5 of the Women's World Championship

These rules are novel and the game is both fun and deep. Make sure you read the rules before playing!

My son asked me how to castle on chess.com the other day, and I found that I couldn't do it the way I normally do. Picking up the king and trying to move it to c1 just caused it to move to d1 instead, every time. I tried walking backwards and redoing a few different moves before this, and that all worked, but it just refused to let me castle by moving the king. Neither the king nor the rook had moved yet, and there was no potential or existing check involved, so what gives? Is there some other rule I'm just not aware of?

Sorry I didn't get a shot of the board as well, I thought I had but I can't find it on my phone now.

Edit: Missed the bishop. Option 2 it is, then.

Levy Rozman aka GothamChess covers the first two games of the Women's World Championship

I have wide swings in my ELO on chess.com. My highest is 1425. I’m typically 1350. But I’ll nosedive into large slumps sometimes.

I have a much harder time if I slump below 1200 than if I stay in my usual 1300 range.

Has anyone else experienced this? I have some theories:

• New accounts start at 1200 so you might have people who are really good but their ELO is not cemented yet.

• Weird chess. The 1300 is playing more principled moves so there is less calculation in the opening. I’ve seen it before. The lower players are playing weird moves that require constant calculating.

• Aggressive queen moves that I can sometimes punish, but again require way more calculating early than a 1300 who keeps their Q safe for longer.

After much speculation, both Carlsen and Nakamura will participate in the World Cup from July 29th to August 25th. The most notable absences are World Champion Ding Liren, Alireza Firouzja and Levon Aronian. Aronian cited concerns about the tournament being held in Azerbaijan.

The SuperUnited Rapid & Blitz is the third tournament and midway point of the Grand Chess Tour, taking place in Zagreb, Croatia.

Format

10 players tournament.

The rapid portion takes part the first three days, consisting in a single round-robin with 3 rounds each day. The time control is 25+10. Rapid games count double.

The blitz portion takes part the last 2 days, in a double round-robin. The time control is 5+2.

Players

1. Magnus Carlsen (2835, Norway)
2. Fabiano Caruana (2782, USA)
3. Ian Nepomniachtchi (2779, FIDE)
4. Alireza Firouzja (2777, France)
5. Viswanathan Anand (2754, India)
6. Richard Rapport (2752, Romania)
7. Gukesh D (2744, India)
8. Jan-Krzysztof Duda (2732, Poland)
9. Ivan Saric (2657, Croatia)
10. Constantin Lupulescu (2582, Romania)

Standings

(after round 9 Rapid)

Links

• Lichess
• chess.com
• chess24
• Twitch channel
• YouTube channel

The title of Women's World Champion will be decided from July 5th to July 23rd 2023. The contenders are Ju Wenjun (2566, current World Champion) and Lei Tingjie (2554) both from China.

Format

12 classical games: 90 minutes for the first 40 moves and 30 more minutes for the rest of the game, plus a 30s increment per move starting on move one. Players cannot offer a draw before they reach the 41st move. Tiebreaks are:

• Four games with 25+10 time control
• Two games with 5+3 time control
• Two more games with 5+3 time control
• One game with a 3+2 time control until a winner is determined

Schedule

One match per day from July 5th to July 22th, except free days (July 7th, July 10th, July 14th, July 17th and July 20th). If needed, tiebreaks on July 23rd. All matches start at 7:00 UTC (15:00 Beijing time).

Results

Links

• Lichess
• chess.com
• chess24
• FIDE YouTube channel
• chess.com YouTube channel

#chess #visualization

Format

This tournament is a double round-robin between 6 teams of six players each, and the two best teams qualify to final phase. Each team is composed by one "icon" on board 1, two male players on boards 2 and 3, two female players on boards 4 and 5, and one junior on board 6.

Scoring

Each game is scored according to:

• Win with black: 4 Game Points (GPs)
• Win with white: 3 GPs
• Draw: 1 GP
• Loss: 0 GPs

The match is scored according to:

• Team that scores most GPs: 3 Match Points (MPs)
• Team that scores the same as rivals: 1 MPs
• Team that scores fewer: 0 MPs

After the double round-robin ends, the two teams with most MPs qualify to the final. The final is a best of two match, with a blitz game as tiebreaker.

Time Controls

Rapid 15+10. Players cannot agree to a draw before 30 moves each.

Teams

Triveni Continental Kings (Avg Elo: 2613)

1. GM Levon Aronian (USA, 2743)
2. GM Yangyi Yu (China, 2734)
3. GM Yi Wei (China, 2716)
4. GM Kateryna Lagno (Russia, 2494)
5. GM Nana Dzagnidze (Georgia, 2543)
6. GM Jonas Buhl Bjerre (Denmark, 2535)

Format

This tournament is a double round-robin between 6 teams of six players each, and the two best teams qualify to final phase. Each team is composed by one "icon" on board 1, two male players on boards 2 and 3, two female players on boards 4 and 5, and one junior on board 6.

Scoring

Each game is scored according to:

• Win with black: 4 Game Points (GPs)
• Win with white: 3 GPs
• Draw: 1 GP
• Loss: 0 GPs

The match is scored according to:

• Team that scores most GPs: 3 Match Points (MPs)
• Team that scores the same as rivals: 1 MPs
• Team that scores fewer: 0 MPs

After the double round-robin ends, the two teams with most MPs qualify to the final. The final is a best of two match, with a blitz game as tiebreaker.

Time Controls

Rapid 15+10. Players cannot agree to a draw before 30 moves each.

Teams

Triveni Continental Kings (Avg Elo: 2613)

1. GM Levon Aronian (USA, 2743)
2. GM Yangyi Yu (China, 2734)
3. GM Yi Wei (China, 2716)
4. GM Kateryna Lagno (Russia, 2494)
5. GM Sara Khademalsharieh (Georgia, 2543)
6. GM Jonas Buhl Bjerre (Denmark, 2535)

UpGrad Mumba Masters (Avg Elo: 2611)

1. GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France, 2767)
2. GM Alexander Grischuk (Russia, 2716)
3. GM Santosh Gujrathi Vidit (India, 2665)
4. GM Humpy Koneru (India, 2469)
5. GM Dronavalli Harika (India, 2450)
6. GM Javokhir Sindarov (Uzbekistan, 2596)

Today's Schedule

Final Match 1

2nd July 2023, 13:15 UTC

Final Match 2

2nd July 2023, 14:20 UTC

Tiebreaks (if needed)

2nd July 2023, 15:40 UTC

Standings

Media

• Official site
• YouTube Live Stream
• Lichess
• Chess24
• chess.com
• chess-results.com
• CGL Metaverse???

Now that the group stage is over, we can discuss which players have made a good/not so good effort for their teams

Board 1

Board 2

Board 3

Board 4

Board 5

Board 6

Changelog (from their GitHub repo):

Quality of chess play

Stockfish continues to demonstrate its ability to discover superior moves with remarkable speed. In self-play against Stockfish 15, this new release gains up to 50 Elo and wins up to 12 times more game pairs than it loses. In major chess engine tournaments, Stockfish reliably tops the rankings winning the TCEC season 24 Superfinal, Swiss, Fischer Random, and Double Random Chess tournaments and the CCC 19 Bullet, 20 Blitz, and 20 Rapid competitions. Leela Chess Zero was the challenger in most finals, putting top-engine chess now firmly in the hands of teams embracing free and open-source software.

Progress made

This updated version of Stockfish introduces several enhancements, including an upgraded neural net architecture (SFNNv6), improved implementation, and refined parameterization. The ongoing utilization of Leela’s data combined with a novel inference approach exploiting sparsity, and network compression ensure a speedy evaluation and modest binary sizes while allowing for more weights and higher accuracy. The search has undergone more optimization, leading to improved performance, particularly in longer analyses. Additionally, the Fishtest framework has been improved and is now able to run the tests needed to validate new ideas with 10000s of CPU cores.

Usability improvements

Stockfish now comes with documentation, found in the wiki folder when downloading it or on GitHub. Additionally, Stockfish now includes a clear and consistent forced tablebase win score, displaying a value of 200 minus the number of plies required to reach a tablebase win. Furthermore, the UCI_Elo option, to reduce its strength, has been calibrated. It is worth noting that the evaluation system remains consistent with Stockfish 15.1, maintaining the choice that 100cp means a 50% chance of winning the game against an equal opponent. Finally, binaries of our latest development version are now provided continuously as pre-releases on GitHub making it easier for enthusiasts to download the latest and strongest version of the program, we thank Roman Korba for having provided a similar service for a long time.

Thank you

The success of the Stockfish project relies on the vibrant community of passionate enthusiasts (we appreciate each and every one of you!) who generously contribute their knowledge, time, and resources. Together, this dedicated community works towards the common goal of developing a powerful, freely accessible, and open-source chess engine. We invite all chess enthusiasts to join the Fishtest testing framework and contribute to the project.

The Stockfish team

Format

This tournament is a double round-robin between 6 teams of six players each, and the two best teams qualify to final phase. Each team is composed by one "icon" on board 1, two male players on boards 2 and 3, two female players on boards 4 and 5, and one junior on board 6.

Scoring

Each game is scored according to:

• Win with black: 4 Game Points (GPs)
• Win with white: 3 GPs
• Draw: 1 GP
• Loss: 0 GPs

The match is scored according to:

• Team that scores most GPs: 3 Match Points (MPs)
• Team that scores the same as rivals: 1 MPs
• Team that scores fewer: 0 MPs

After the double round-robin ends, the two teams with most MPs qualify to the final. The final is a best of two match, with a blitz game as tiebreaker.

Time Controls

Rapid 15+10. Players cannot agree to a draw before 30 moves each.

Teams

Triveni Continental Kings (Avg Elo: 2613)

1. GM Levon Aronian (USA, 2743)
2. GM Yangyi Yu (China, 2734)
3. GM Yi Wei (China, 2716)
4. GM Kateryna Lagno (Russia, 2494)
5. GM Nana Dzagnidze (Georgia, 2543)
6. GM Jonas Buhl Bjerre (Denmark, 2535)

Chingari Gulf Titans (Avg Elo: 2628)

1. GM Jan-Krzystof Duda (Poland, 2794)
2. GM Shahriyar Mamedyarov (Azerbaijan, 2694)
3. GM Daniil Dubov (Russia, 2727)
4. GM Alexandra Kosteniuk (FIDE, 2524)
5. IM Polina Shuvalova (Russia, 2357)
6. GM Sarin Nihal (India, 2672)

SG Alpine Warriors (Avg Elo: 2589)

1. GM Magnus Carlsen (Norway, 2829)
2. GM Gukesh D (India, 2629)
3. GM Arjun Erigasi (India, 2714)
4. GM Irina Krush (USA, 2400)
5. GM Elisabeth Paehtz (Germany, 2373)
6. GM Praggnanandhaa R (India, 2587)

Balan Alaskan Knights (Avg Elo: 2600)

1. GM Ian Nepomniachtchi (Russia, 2760)
2. GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov (Uzbekistan, 2703)
3. GM Teimour Radjabov (Azerbaijan, 2694)
4. GM Zhongyi Tan (China, 2517)
5. GM Nino Batsiashvili (Georgia, 2358)
6. Raunak Sadhwani (India, 2567)

Ganges Grandmasters (Avg Elo: 2639)

1. GM Viswanathan Anand (India, 2713)
2. GM Richard Rapport (Romania, 2761)
3. GM Leinier Domínguez Pérez (USA, 2706)
4. GM Yifan Hou (China, 2540)
5. GM Bela Khotenashvili (Georgia, 2414)
6. Andrey Esipenko (FIDE, 2682)

UpGrad Mumba Masters (Avg Elo: 2611)

1. GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France, 2767)
2. GM Alexander Grischuk (Russia, 2716)
3. GM Santosh Gujrathi Vidit (India, 2665)
4. GM Humpy Koneru (India, 2469)
5. GM Dronavalli Harika (India, 2450)
6. GM Javokhir Sindarov (Uzbekistan, 2596)

Today's Schedule

Match 27

1st July 2023, 11:15 UTC

Alpine Warriors vs. Chingari Gulf Titans

Match 28

1st July 2023, 12:30 UTC

Triveni Continental Kings vs. Ganges Grandmasters

Match 29

1st July 2023, 13:45 UTC

UpGrad Mumba Masters vs. Alpine Warriors

Match 30

1st July 2023, 15:00 UTC

Chingari Gulf Titans vs. Balan Alaskan Knights

Standings

Balan Alaskan Knights is out of contention for the finals

Media

• Official site
• YouTube Live Stream
• Lichess
• Chess24
• chess.com
• chess-results.com
• CGL Metaverse???

An interesting video were Sebastian Lague explains how he optimized his chess bot. You can play against his bot in Lichess.

Format

This tournament is a double round-robin between 6 teams of six players each, and the two best teams qualify to final phase. Each team is composed by one "icon" on board 1, two male players on boards 2 and 3, two female players on boards 4 and 5, and one junior on board 6.

Scoring

Each game is scored according to:

• Win with black: 4 Game Points (GPs)
• Win with white: 3 GPs
• Draw: 1 GP
• Loss: 0 GPs

The match is scored according to:

• Team that scores most GPs: 3 Match Points (MPs)
• Team that scores the same as rivals: 1 MPs
• Team that scores fewer: 0 MPs

After the double round-robin ends, the two teams with most MPs qualify to the final. The final is a best of two match, with a blitz game as tiebreaker.

Time Controls

Rapid 15+10. Players cannot agree to a draw before 30 moves each.

Teams

Triveni Continental Kings (Avg Elo: 2613)

1. GM Levon Aronian (USA, 2743)
2. GM Yangyi Yu (China, 2734)
3. GM Yi Wei (China, 2716)
4. GM Kateryna Lagno (Russia, 2494)
5. GM Nana Dzagnidze (Georgia, 2543)
6. GM Jonas Buhl Bjerre (Denmark, 2535)

Chingari Gulf Titans (Avg Elo: 2628)

1. GM Jan-Krzystof Duda (Poland, 2794)
2. GM Shahriyar Mamedyarov (Azerbaijan, 2694)
3. GM Daniil Dubov (Russia, 2727)
4. GM Alexandra Kosteniuk (FIDE, 2524)
5. IM Polina Shuvalova (Russia, 2357)
6. GM Sarin Nihal (India, 2672)

SG Alpine Warriors (Avg Elo: 2589)

1. GM Magnus Carlsen (Norway, 2829)
2. GM Gukesh D (India, 2629)
3. GM Arjun Erigasi (India, 2714)
4. GM Irina Krush (USA, 2400)
5. GM Elisabeth Paehtz (Germany, 2373)
6. GM Praggnanandhaa R (India, 2587)

Balan Alaskan Knights (Avg Elo: 2600)

1. GM Ian Nepomniachtchi (Russia, 2760)
2. GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov (Uzbekistan, 2703)
3. GM Teimour Radjabov (Azerbaijan, 2694)
4. GM Zhongyi Tan (China, 2517)
5. GM Nino Batsiashvili (Georgia, 2358)
6. Raunak Sadhwani (India, 2567)

Ganges Grandmasters (Avg Elo: 2639)

1. GM Viswanathan Anand (India, 2713)
2. GM Richard Rapport (Romania, 2761)
3. GM Leinier Domínguez Pérez (USA, 2706)
4. GM Yifan Hou (China, 2540)
5. GM Bela Khotenashvili (Georgia, 2414)
6. Andrey Esipenko (FIDE, 2682)

UpGrad Mumba Masters (Avg Elo: 2611)

1. GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France, 2767)
2. GM Alexander Grischuk (Russia, 2716)
3. GM Santosh Gujrathi Vidit (India, 2665)
4. GM Humpy Koneru (India, 2469)
5. GM Dronavalli Harika (India, 2450)
6. GM Javokhir Sindarov (Uzbekistan, 2596)

Today's Schedule

Match 23

30th June 2023, 11:15 UTC

UpGrad Mumba Masters vs. Chingari Gulf Titans

Match 24

30th June 2023, 12:30 UTC

Triveni Continental Kings vs. Alpine Warriors

Match 25

30th June 2023, 13:45 UTC

Ganges Grandmasters vs. UpGrad Mumba Masters

Match 26

30th June 2023, 15:00 UTC

Balan Alaskan Knights vs. Triveni Continental Kings

Standings

Media

• Official site
• YouTube Live Stream
• Lichess
• Chess24
• chess.com
• chess-results.com
• CGL Metaverse???