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Despite the efforts to make the chess scenes believable, there are still areas in which the series comes up short. The most apparent is in how fast the players move during the tournaments. As one tournament director tells Beth before a competition in Cincinnati, each player has two hours to make 40 moves, which was, and still is, a standard time control for such games. But in every match, Beth and her opponents make each of their moves after taking only a few seconds to think about them. At such a tempo, they would finish their games in minutes, not hours. The speed is understandable for filmmaking because watching players sit at a board for hours, barely moving, is not riveting. But it is also not accurate.

Nor is having competitors talk during some of the games. Other than offering a draw essentially agreeing that the match ends in a tie players do not speak to each other during matches. It is not only considered bad sportsmanship, it is also against the rules. But several times, as in Beths game against Harry in Episode 2, in which she gloats near the end, and in her game against a young Russian prodigy in Mexico City in Episode 4, Beth and her opponents engage in verbal exchanges. The dialogue makes the games more understandable and spices up the drama, but once again, it is not true to life.

Though The Queens Gambit is a work of fiction and the characters that appear in it never existed, there are passing references to players who did, among them the world champions Jos Ral Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Botvinnik and Boris Spassky.

There is also a curious moment when Harry compares Beth to Paul Morphy, an American, who played that famous game at the Paris Opera in 1858 and who is widely considered the greatest player of the 19th century. The comparison seems like a misdirection. Despite her self-destructive tendencies, Beth does not resemble Morphy. She is closer to a female version of another champion: Bobby Fischer.

That may not be accidental. Walter Tevis, who wrote the 1983 novel on which the series is based, was a passionate and knowledgeable amateur player. In making the protagonist a woman playing a game that had long been dominated by men and which continues to be today, though no one knows the reason Tevis may have been expressing a hope that one day there might be true equality of the sexes over the board.

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Im a Chess Expert. Heres What The Queens Gambit Gets Right - The New York Times

The fun part of these streams is important for drawing in young fans who could fall in love with a game that develops analytical thinking skills, concentration, and creativity. Part of the magic of the most popular internet streams is watching a genius on the level of Magnus Carlsen playing with and teaching amateurs who themselves already know how to entertain an internet audience.

The internet chess carnival will continue as the official chess organization, FIDE, announced in October it was postponing the in-person Candidates Tournament until next year while COVID-19 continues to surge around the world. The tournament, which determines the challenger to the world champion, started in Russia this March before organizers hurriedly called it off as Russia began shutting down international flights. Now that partially played tournament is delayed at least until spring.

When FIDE first called off the tournament in March, Carlsen created his own online chess tour built around rapid games instead of the usual hourslong classical games of traditional elite chess tournaments. It was a big hit, going so well he decided to do a sequel tour that will start this month. On top of winning all these tournaments during the pandemic, Carlsen is winning in the business of chess: His chess company that centers on online chess, Play Magnus Group, had a $42 million debut on the Oslo Stock Exchange in October.

The online format brought new drama. Chinese player Ding Liren, ranked third globally, had to find technical workarounds to participate in the tournaments because China blocks gaming sites like Chess24, which hosted the Magnus Tour. Ding struggled through regular disconnections and had to play in the wee hours because of time zone differences.

A new online rivalry developed through that tour between Carlsen and one of the top American players, Hikaru Nakamura. Theyve had exciting showdowns during the online tournaments, and Nakamura seemed to be one of the few who could rattle Carlsen. Nakamura is one of the biggest internet chess celebrities, with millions tuning in to his Twitch streams during the pandemic. In September Nakamura became one of the first chess players to sign with an e-sports agency.

He stoked chess interest by training other Twitch stars in chess and then hosting competitions. Like Rainas channel, Nakamuras is fun to watch because it mixes genius brains like his with regular people trying to learn chess. But Nakamura also thinks the quick games online make for better viewing.

Because you have winners and losers, more people will follow it even if they cant necessarily understand what exactly is going on, Nakamura told the gaming news site Kotaku. (By contrast, most high-level classical chess games end in ties.)

Kotaku, the gaming site, worried moving chess online would open the game up to the internets toxicity. But from my hours of watching chess online, I would say that toxicity isnt immediately evident.

From the professional commentary to the banter among players, chess seems to be one of the purer corners of the internet in many ways (if you dont read the comments!). Some moments in online tournaments were almost a mockery of the toxicity of the internet: During one tournament, a blind musician, Oleg Akkuratov, sang and played jazz while the players were thinking between moves.

But one element of toxicity has come up as the game has moved online: cheating. In October, Chess.com issued a lifetime ban on Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian after its fair play team determined he had cheated in an online tournament. His team, the Armenia Eagles, was disqualified after initially beating out the Americans, the Saint Louis Arch Bishops, for a $20,000 prize. Cheating in chess usually means using a computer chess engine to determine best moves.

And speaking of internet toxicity, after the cheating accusation first appeared from American player Wesley So, Petrosian published a long, insulting rant against So. Maybe the culture of streaming platforms will drag chess into this kind of drama, but the current top players are all very likable and not given to brashness.

For example: The top American player and No. 2 in the world, Fabiano Caruana, is soft-spoken and universally acknowledged as a nice guy. He has played in the major online tournaments but said at the first in-person tournament in Norway in October that he wanted to see a balance between online and classical. Right now unfortunately we can only really play online chess.

Whatever the drawbacks of internet culture and rapid chess, the pandemic has brought in a new generation of chess fans. Sometimes that fandom comes at the expense of homework.

In a comment beneath the 1-hour YouTube video featuring Raina and Carlsen, Suryam Agarwal wrote, I dont know anything about chess, I have many assignments left to do, still I watched the whole video.

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The 2020 internet chess carnival | WORLD News Group - WORLD News Group

11/5/2020 A team of scientists from Germany, the Netherlands and the USA studied the development of cognitive abilities in humans and evaluated them using chess games. The result: cognitive skills only increase up to a certain age and today's chess players play better than those of previous generations. | Picture: Pixabay

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A team of scientists from Germany, the Netherlands and the USA researched the development of intelligence by evaluating the results of a total of 24,000 chess games played between 1890 and 2014 with a total of 1.6 million moves.

The scientists wanted to find out whether and how the cognitive abilities developed over the course of the lives of the players in question and how the skills of players from previous generations compare with the skills of today's players.

With the help of computers the scientists evaluated nd compared the quality of the moves and looked for patterns and developments.

The scientists reached the following conclusions:

1. Human cognitive abilities are age-dependent. At first, they continue to increase, but from a certain age, around 35 years, they stagnate.

2. Today, people perform better in chess than people of the same age in earlier generations. The level of play has risen continuously over the course of the study period of almost 125 years.

The results were recently published in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" (PNAS).

However, Professor Sunde, one of the scientists who conducted the study, indicated a weakness of the study, which is that a lot of top players stop playing tournament chess around the age of 50.

Another arguable weakness of the study is the fact that the ability to play good chess is a very special talent. Good chess skills are not necessarily transferable to cognitive performance in other areas. Moreover, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century chess theory was hardly developed. And the computer has dramatically increased the knowledge of chess and improved the level of play in the last 30 years.

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Chess and scientific research - Chessbase News

How competitive is Robert Saleh? Ill let you be the judge of that.

The 49ers defensive coordinator meets with a familiar foe Thursday night in Packers head coach Matt LaFleur. Saleh and LaFleur struck up a friendship while working together on Central Michigans staff in 2004 before crossing paths again in Houston, where Saleh held the title of defensive quality control coach. LaFleur, meanwhile, served as an offensive assistant under veteran coach Gary Kubiak.

The two eventually branched out with LaFleur ascending to head coach status in Green Bay via Tennessee and Los Angeles (where he rubbed shoulders with offensive prodigy Sean McVay) and Saleh joining forces with Kyle Shanahan (also a Texans alum) in San Francisco. Despite their shared past, the 41-year-old Saleh has no plans to go easy on LaFleur Thursday night. Its difficult to compartmentalize when your opponent is a close friend, unless youre Saleh, who claims hed go full throttle against his own mother if he ever got the chance.

Yikes. Saleh is not the sentimental type, it would seem. Jason Pierre-Paul of the Buccaneers made headlines last week when he expressed wanting to destroy his former team, the New York Giants, on Monday Night Football. Thats one thing, but dunking on your own mother? Thats cold.

The Saleh/LaFleur narrative is certainly a thread worth pulling on, but the bigger narrative surrounding Thursday night's game is the lack of available bodies with both teams weathering mass absences brought on by the continuing spread of COVID-19. Its a marvel the game is even being played with Green Bay trotting out spare parts at the running back position (forgotten sixth-round pick Dexter Williams will be tasked with backing up Aaron Jones in this one) and San Francisco down to its millionth-string wide receiver (who, apparently, is Richie James). To quote the great Jerry Seinfeld, good luck with all that.

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Niners DC Robert Saleh would gladly beat his mother in chess - CBS Sports Radio 910

GM Jeffery Xiong won the November 3 Titled Tuesday tournament, only his second Titled Tuesday victory so far. The American grandmaster finished on a fantastic 10/11 and remained undefeated.

Xiong had won once before, on April 18, 2017, which was also a qualifier for the Speed Chess Championship of that year. Like then, Xiong finished in clear first place in this week's tournament, an 11-round Swiss at a 3+1 time control with a total of 702 participants.

The live broadcast of the tournament.

There was a very surprising leader after seven rounds: IM Loic Travadon (@lolo9292), who was the only player left with a 100 percent score.

The French IM won his seventh game against the Indian talent GM Raunak Sadhwani (@RaunakSadhwani2005) in a game that can only be called The Dance of the Knights.

That was where the fun ended for Travadon, who lost three games in a row. In round eight, he was nicely outplayed by GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov (@ChessWarrior7197).

Xiong started with five wins before drawing with GMs Hikaru Nakamura (@Hikaru) and Vladimir Fedoseev (@Bigfish1995). The young American GM then won four games in a row to clinch the title, also profiting from the move-less draw between the other two players who were on 9/10, Sadhwani and the Dutch GM Jorden van Foreest (@joppie2).

Xiong's last-round win was against none other than GM Alireza Firouzja (@Firouzja2003). The American player surely knew his way in the Closed Sicilian, but it was only in the endgame that Firouzja blundered:

November 3 Titled Tuesday | Final Standings (Top 20)

Xiong won the $750 first prize, GM Daniil Dubov (@Duhless) won $400, Sadhwani $150, and Van Foreest $100. The$100 prize for the best female player went to GM Valentina Gunina (@Vanina1989) who scored 7.5/11.

Titled Tuesday isChess.com's weekly tournament for titled players. It starts each Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time (19:00 Central Europe) with a weekly prize fund of $1,600.

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Jeffery Xiong Wins Nov. 3 Titled Tuesday - Chess.com