Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Brendan, I also was following the F R championships, but missed most of Saturday (semis) and all of the Sunday finals.

F R is really bewildering...my feeble chess understanding must be based mostly on pattern recognition, because I feel lost trying to evaluate F R positions!

Going to watch the Halloween blitz replay rather than F R. Nakamura has been posting daily wrap-ups on the F R, and I'll probably watch his Sunday video tomorrow, since he won the event.

Sounds good, I watched the final between HN and Nepo earlier tonight - I'm sure you'll enjoy it:-)

Ominous and strange developments concerning chess legend Anatoly Karpov. See for instance

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/world/europe/anatoly-karpov-chess-champion-russia.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/anatoly-karpov-russia-criticized-ukraine-war-serious-head-injuries-reports-2022-11

No coherent reports have been published, which seems indicative of how, uh, messed up... the situation in Russia is.

Wow, this story gets stranger the further you read.

His wife says the whole thing is made up and he is at home, while his daughter says he is in a coma as a result of an accident!

J-K Duda ("The Dude", as they call him on chess.com) with a beautiful checkmating combination vs. Giri:

https://chess24.com/en/watch/live-tournaments/meltwater-champions-chess-tour-finals-2022/3/3/3

28. Rg7+!!

Commentator GM Rustam Kazimdzhanov spotted and announced this before it was played. Impressive.

Got it, thanks Geeker:-)

It's a shame that, when facing a forced mate, the player always resigns and deprives us of seeing it played out on the board 😥

Nowadays in online chess, some players actually do allow beautiful mates to be played out on the board!
Giri, though very online savvy (big Twitter presence) is not that type of guy.
Funny thing: Duda was playing online from his home in Poland, and was grinning from ear to ear as the combination unfolded. In OTB chess he'd likely have kept a poker face.

Brendan, I just realized that 33.Rf4+ in the Duda game doesn't really win back the Q; White has a weak back rank and gets mated if he captures the Q, so 33. Re5+ with mate is the only move.

Admission (yes, I'm a cretin):

I stayed up late to watch (online) the 2 big hyped "Chessboxing" matches. GM Aman Hambleton vs IM Lawrence Trent, and on the distaff side, WGM Dina Belenkaya vs. untitled Andrea Botez.

I enjoyed them, but had to sit through some other matchups that were less good.

Oh my! I'd never heard of this - boxing and chess!!

I do love chess even if I am pretty rubbish at it but, regards boxing, I did "used to do a bit", as we say in the East End, when I was younger. Although a girl I used to live with thought it was barbaric (boxing not chess 😂) and, as time went on, she did start to win me over. She was nothing if not pragmatic though and, for a present once, bought me The Fight by Norman Mailer.