While the final round of the day did not turn out so great, the team can still be pleased with how they played. The star from day 1 was CM Ryan Lane, who score 2 wins and a draw from his 4 games. He is his first win, from round 2.
Lane,Ryan (2143) - Slavin,Gennadie (2201) [C06]
The 2026 World Rapid and Blitz Teams Championship is underway in Hong Kong. A mixture of Olympiad style chess with 'make up your own teams' approach to entry, it has attracted most of the Worlds leading players.
It has also been graced with the presence of a team representing Street Chess Canberra. The initial team list was to consist of players who had played a significant number of Street Chess events over the years, but a few drop outs required some 'ringers' to be selected. Nonetheless a team of 8 players (all AUS) are playing, and despite being one of the bottom seeds, are already putting up a good fight.
The 1st round saw the team go down 0.5-5.5 to Red Psuedodragon (Fred Litchfield drawing with IM Polina Shuvalova), before narrow 2.5-3.5 losses against higher seeded teams in rounds 2 and 3. There are 4 rounds per day, and you can follow the action on Lichess.
Kurochkin,Victor (2356) - Richards,Heather S (2097) [B07]
The 2026 World Youth Chess Championship (Under 16, Under 16 and Under 14 Open and Girls) is underway in Montesilvano, Italy. Around 750 players from 85 Federations are represented,with Italy, the USA and Kazakhstan sending the largest delegations. As with events of this size, there is always the chance of a 1st round upset, although board 2 of the Under 18 Open may have not been anyone's first choice.
Kvaloy,Aksel Bu (2483) - Schneider,Aron (2204) [B45]
My current tourist excursion to Europe is not particularly chess related, even though there have been some small chess activities along the way. To emphasise this, I'm even missing the final weekend of the 4NCL, even if I will be quite close to the venue this weekend (well 60km's away, which is close if you are an Australian, but a 2 hour journey if you're not). I will at least be there in spirit, as I do provide some sponsorship support for the White Rose team. They have been having a 'middling' season in Div 1 so far (5 match wins, 4 losses), but they did win the 1st round of the final weekend today. This was aided by a top board win for GM Gawain Maroroa-Jones, over fellow GM Danny Gormally
Gormally,Daniel W (2377) - Maroroa Jones,Gawain C B (2645) [C78]
According to some tourist guides Jardin du Luxembourg is a place to find some park chess. However it depends upon which day you visit. During the week the chess tables seemed empty but a second visit by myself on a Sunday afternoon saw the chess tables overflowing with players and spectators.
Watching some of the games it was a little hard to estimate the strength of players. For every game decided by sacrificial kingside attack, there would be another where one of the players hung their queen. Opening theory also seemed a little rough and ready, so my guess is that for a lot of the games, 1600 would be about right.
But to prove that chess is a universal language, I was able to follow a lot of the discussions, despite having a very basic understanding of French. In one game a player (as white) had played Rxb7, and the opponent was presumably asking if he could castle queenside. 'Non' was the incorrect reply , and so he castled in the opposite direction, dropping the c pawn. I assume it was a case that neither player knew the rules, rather than deliberate trickery. Supporting this theory, I also noticed that 'clock move' seemed to be the rule, as a number of obvious blunders were corrected by moving the piece to a better square before the clock was pressed.
So if you are visiting Paris, definitely drop in, but make sure it is on the weekend, rather than a weekday.
Recently I blew up my aging desktop computer (with real smoke etc) and with it, by very aging copy of chessbase. As luck would have it, O was able to score a cheapish copy of Chessbase 17 , which is apparently the last version you could get on physical media.
One feature I like is the provision of live event databases. This may help me find more interesting games for this blog, as previously I had the choice between downloading pgn files (usually from TWIC) or pretending that Keres v Petrosian was still cutting edge opening theory.
As an example, here is a game from the current World Seniors Teams Championship. It caught my eye because the winner was a contemporary of formerly active Canberra player Andrey Bliznyuk, while his opponent was also a pretty useful player, having toweled me up in the 2017 Gibraltar Masters.
Bergstrom,Rolf (2148) - Vaisser,Anatoli (2412) [C02]
In more increasingly busy role as Secretary of the FIDE Qualfication Commission, I receive a lot of strange queries that do not always have anything to do with my job. One recent query was from a player claiming a record for playing the longest game without moving his uncaptured queen. The first important point is FIDE QC do not endorse or approve such records, as it isn't our job, and secondly, such claims are often incorrect. In this specific case the claim was for a 35 move game, which turned to be around 10 moves short of the actual record. Indeed there was even a GM v GM clash that went for 40 moves, and resulted in a win for the player who did not need to use his queen at all!
Panno,Oscar (2520) - Biyiasas,Peter (2460) [E69]
