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Chess.com is thrilled to announce the Chess.com Rapid Chess Championship, our most elite event ever. The first "RCC" debuts with a prize fund of $650,000. This 25-week extravaganza begins on February 12 and culminates in a dramatic finale on August 28. Only the best of the best will be playing: the top 100 in the world, the top 10 women, and the top 10 juniors will have a seat at the table.

With only the strongest players comprising the field and the slower time control, fans can expect nothing but high-quality chess. Many top GMs like Fabiano Caruana, Anish Giri, Hikaru Nakamura, Wesley So, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Levon Aronian, and more are expected to participate in this event regularly.

Participants will also be allowed to stream this event, under controlled (chat disabled, along with other stringent Fair Play requirements) circumstances. This will provide a unique opportunity to offer viewers rare insights into high-level play, especially thanks to the rapid time format. 10+0 is the most popular time control on Chess.com but is rarely used in top-level events. In this format, players will have more time to strategize their way to victory.

Who doesnt want to hear Nakamura discuss his thought process in a 10-minute game against the worlds best players? Speaking of Nakamura, here is what he had to say about the Chess.com Rapid Chess Championship: "Im hyped to play in this event constructed by Chess.com in a way that seems to meet many of the top 100 chess players needs. Its got a flexible schedule, zero commitment, and yet seems to be a surefire hit with both the top players and the fans. With no additional demands being made by Chess.com on the participants time, it really is an ideal fit for so many schedules."

Im hyped to play in this event ... a surefire hit with both the top players and the fans.

- Hikaru Nakamura

Junior players made big waves in 2021, and we are happy to provide a special opportunity for them to play against the best players in the world. Recently-crowned World Rapid Champion, GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and other top junior players will have a chance to shine against the world's elite on a more frequent basis. We look forward to more juniors entering the top 100 in 2022 and qualifying for the event.

The mixture of top-100 players, the best juniors, and the top female players in the world will create some truly exciting match-ups and provide incredible opportunities for the next generation to continue to hone their skills.

The $650,000 prize fund is the biggest that Chess.com has ever offered, and it will be distributed throughout the entirety of the event. The first 25 weeks of the event have $500,000 allocated, which equates to $20,000 on the line per week. The finals have a $150,000 prize fund as well as the title of 2022 Chess.com Rapid Champion.

Chess.com's CEO Erik is thrilled for Chess.com to be able to offer this event:

"As a fan, I cannot wait to see who becomes the first Chess.com Rapid Champion! As a Chess.com team member, I feel proud to be able to offer an opportunity to compete in online chess in a format they enjoy and with conditions they appreciate."

Who are you excited to see in the 2022 Chess.com Rapid Chess Championship? Let us know in the comments below.

Read more:
Announcing The Chess.com Rapid Chess Championship With $650,000 In Prizes - Chess.com

With chess back in this years Hangzhou Asian Games, in China, India has begun its preparations by short-listing 20 probables 10 men and 10 women with an eye on winning maximum out of the 12 medals across four events.

As per the players international ratings, the All India Chess Federation (AICF) has prepared the probables list headed by Vidit Gujrathi (men) and K. Humpy (women).

Viswanathan Anand, the mentor of the squad, will hold an online training session for the team members from February 3 to 10.

The individual events for men and women under rapid time control will be from September 11 to 14. The team event, across four boards separately for men and women, under standard time control will be from September 16 to 24.

The probables:

Men: Vidit Gujarathi, P Harikrishna, Nihal Sarin, S. L. Narayanan, K. Sasikiran, B Adhiban, M. Karthikeyan, Arjun Erigaisi, Abhijeet Gupta and Surya Shekhar Ganguly.

Women: K Humpy, D Harika, R. Vaishali, Tania Sachdev, Bhakti Kulkarni, Vantika Agrawal, Mary Ann Gomes, Soumya Swaminathan, Eesha Karavade and Divya Deshmukh.

Read the original here:
Chess | Vidit, Humpy to lead at Hangzhou Asian Games - The Hindu

Have you ever wondered who is the richest female Grand Master in the world? (Sorry, Beth Harmon is not the right answer) We are talking about real-life female chess Grand Masters. Alike any other sport, in chess as well, male players get the maximum attention from fans, and as incredible as female chess players the world has ever witnessed, only a few people know them as they know their male contemporaries.

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The Hungarian Grand Master and the greatest female chess player of all time, Judit Polgar, is the worlds richest female chess player. She was the World No. 1 female chess player from 1989 to her retirement in 2014. The 45-year-old Grand Master has a net worth of $1 million. On the list of the worlds richest chess players, she is on number 5, which makes her even richer than many current male players.

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Most of her income comes from being a player, and in June 2015, she was elected as the captain and head coach of the national Hungarian mens team.

In 1991, when she was 15, she broke the record of Bobby fisher and became the youngest Grand Master ever. She is the only woman to cross 2700 Elo rating and since the age of 12, she has been the best female player in the world. Even after 8 years of her retirement from international chess, her records remain unsurpassed.

She has defeated most of the world champions during her career and she is undisputedly the best female chess player the world has ever seen. The list of her ruins includes Garry Kasparov, Magnus Carlsen, Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, Boris Spassky, Vladimir Kramnik, Ruslan Ponomariov, and Veselin Topalov.

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She has had an amazing career, and her contribution to chess is unforgettable. Many Grand Masters agree her games were entertaining, and a treat to watch. In 2016, she gave a speech on TED about her career and what shaped her into one of the worlds greatest chess players.

Judit Polgar is the real-life Beth Harmon, the one we should all know about. She is indeed the worlds richest female chess player, but more than that, she is a role model for every chess fan out there.

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Here are some of the most amazing games she played against the male world champions.

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Who is the Richest Female Chess Grandmaster? - EssentiallySports

On one level, chess seems like a simple game: 64 individual black or white squares, 16 pieces per side, and two competitors striving for conquest.

Dig a little deeper though, and the game offers incredibly complex possibilities, posing challenges to chess theorists and mathematicians that can go unsolved for decades or even centuries.

In July 2021, one such challenge was finally solved at least, up to a point. Mathematician Michael Simkin, from Harvard University in Massachusetts, put his mind to the n-queens problem that has been puzzling experts since it was first imagined in the 1840s.

If you know your chess, you know that the queen is the most powerful piece on the board, able to move any number of squares in any direction. The n-queens problem asks this: With a certain number of queens (n), how many arrangements are possible where the queens are far enough apart so none of them can take any of the others?

For eight queens on a standard 8 x 8 board, the answer is 92, although most of these are rotated or reflected variants of just 12 fundamental solutions.

But what about 1,000 queens on a board that's 1,000 x 1,000 squares? What about a million queens? Simkin's approximate solution to the problem is (0.143n)n the number of queens multiplied by 0.143, raised to the power of n.

What you're left with is not the precise answer, but it's as close as it's possible to get right now. With a million queens, the figure comes out as a number with five million digits after it so we won't reproduce it for you here.

It took almost five years for Simkin to come up with the equation, with a variety of approaches and techniques used, and a few barriers on the way to a solution. Ultimately the mathematician was able to calculate the lower bounds and the upper bounds of possible solutions using different methods, finding that they almost matched.

"If you were to tell me I want you to put your queens in such-and-such way on the board, then I would be able to analyze the algorithm and tell you how many solutions there are that match this constraint," says Simkin.

"In formal terms, it reduces the problem to an optimization problem."

Early on, Simkin and colleague Zur Luria at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich collaborated on a variation of the n-queens problem known as the torodial or modular problem. In this one, the diagonals wrap around the board, so a queen could move diagonally off the right edge of a board and reappear on the left, for example.

This grants each queen symmetry of attack, but it isn't how a normal chessboard works: a queen in the corner of the board doesn't have as many angles of attack as one in the center.

Ultimately, the pair's work on the toroidal problem stalled (although they published some results), but Simkin ended up adapting some of the fruits of that labor into his final solution.

As the boards get bigger and the number of queens increases, the research shows that in most allowable configurations the queens tend to congregate along the sides of the board, with fewer queens in the middle, where they are exposed to attack. This knowledge enables a more weighted approach.

In theory, a more precise answer to the n-queen puzzle should be possible but Simkin has got us closer than ever before, and he's happy to pass the challenge on to someone else to study further.

"I think that I may personally be done with the n-queens problem for a while, not because there isn't anything more to do with it but just because I've been dreaming about chess and I'm ready to move on with my life," says Simkin.

Simkin's paper on the solution is available on the preprint server arXiv.

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A Harvard Mathematician Has Basically Solved an Epic, 150-Year-Old Chess Problem - ScienceAlert

When it came time to plan an exhibition celebrating the World Chess Hall of Fame's first decade in St. Louis, even chief curator Shannon Bailey, who has been at the WCHOF since it moved in 2011, found herself surprised by all the museum has accomplished.

"Fifty exhibitions...that was theshocker," she laughs. "We realized we had done 50 shows."

Those shows have included artworks by Keith Haring and M.C. Escher, explorations of chess' place in politics and history, artifacts from great games and players, and incredible chess sets from all over the world. And until July 17, pieces of each of the 50 previous exhibitions will be on display throughout the WCHOF as part of Mind, Art, Experience: 10 Years of Chess & Culture in Saint Louis, the museum's first-ever museum-wide exhibition.

"We realized that it was so hard to whittle down into one gallery what we've done in 10 years," Bailey says. "So we decided to do it in the entire museum, which is the first time that we've done it on all three floors. We thought, let's pick some of the highlights from some of the shows, things that had been talked about a lot over the years."

One easy picks for that list wasLiliya Lifnovas performance art pieceAnatomy is Destiny, which has been in storage since 2012, when it was last shown through WCHOF and performed at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

"[Lifnovas work was placed]among like Barbara Kruger and Tom Friedman and Yoko Ono, some of these artists that you study in art history," says Bailey. "These are artists who exhibit atmajor international museums. And the visitors almost unanimously picked her piece of their most favorite piece in the show...the whole thing was just magical, and we've been talking about that piece for 10 years."

Mind, Art, Experience is a rare opportunity for visitors to see pieces they missed or revisit old favorites. It also gives the WCHOF the chance to share new works by artists featured in previous shows. Bill Smith, whose work was featured in a solo show in 2013, had since sold or repurposed the pieces from that exhibition. The plan was to show one new piece of his as part of the retrospective. Instead, he arrived in St. Louis with three.

"He brought them in the other day and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, they're amazing. I can't pick.' We really only had room for two, but they're fabulous. So we havea couple of new, fresh [pieces]that are representing shows that had been here before," says Bailey.

As the World Chess Hall of Fame looks back at its decade on Maryland Avenue, Bailey hopes this retrospective, like all their shows, provides something for everyone, from those who have never picked up a pawn to Grand Masters.

"What I think I'm most proud of about the show is that, our mission, we're obviously a hall of fame, we're a cultural institution, we're a chess museum. But I always like to say that we're here to kind of show how chess has survived for 1500 years. It hasencompassed all cultures, all groups of people, all ages...my whole thing is just:come in, have fun, and learn something."

Mind, Art, Experience is on view through July 17.Areceptioncelebrating the exhibition along and the World Chess Hall of Fame's 10-year anniversary in Saint Louis will be held April 14.

January 28, 2022

10:39 AM

Read the rest here:
World Chess Hall of Fame celebrates 10 years with "Mind, Art, Experience" - St. Louis Magazine