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

24 races, with some improvements in regionalisation: Japan moved to April between Australia and China, Azerbaijan in September, and Qatar before Abu Dhabi. Also, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia will have races in Saturday to accommodate Ramadan.

Formula 1 press release
FIA press release

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