Daily Archives: May 14, 2020

It was 8 a.m. Tuesday in St. Louis when the American chess grandmaster Fabiano Caruana, ranked second best in the world, moved his pawn to E4.

It was 6:30 p.m., and over 8,000 miles away in Nashik, India, when his opponent, Vidit Gujrathi, responded from his home, just seconds after Caruanas opening: pawn to E5.

And so began the Online Nations Cup, an unprecedented international team chess tournament borne of the coronavirus pandemic.

While the outbreak has forced most sports around the world to shut down, chess has not only found a way to carry on it is thriving in some ways. In the past several weeks there has been a surge in grass roots participation in chess to go along with a few high-profile professional events online.

This past week, the Online Nations Cup brought 36 of the worlds top players together in their homes across multiple time zones, from Brooklyn to Beijing. They have been moving pieces on their laptop chessboards in a competition that, at its core, is the same game they would contest under normal conditions.

The tournament can be seen on multiple platforms, has a record purse of $180,000 and is being broadcast in a dozen languages.

It is one of the biggest things weve ever done on chess.com, said Daniel Rensch, the co-founder of the site, who commentates on the action live.

Video game versions of most sports entail entirely different skill sets from the real thing; manipulating a remote device from a couch bears little resemblance to being sacked by a 300-pound lineman. But online chess is essentially the same game, and when other sports were halted in March under a worldwide shutdown, fans were left starving for something to watch and do.

With newfound time on their hands, people have turned to online chess by the millions.

Participation online has doubled, at least doubled, said Arkady Dvorkovich, the president of FIDE, chesss world governing body, which is co-hosting the Online Nations Cup with chess.com.

The flood of enthusiasm has left chess.com and the other big chess websites like Chess24 and Lichess scrambling to keep up. Nick Barton, the director of business development for chess.com, said server capacity had to be increased to meet demand, technicians and engineers were asked to work overtime, and others were hired to handle the global crush.

The servers twice went down briefly once by design and officials could virtually track the spread of the virus through the geography of the new sign-ups.

It has been sad in a way, because you could see it move country by country, Rensch said. Italy went from 4,000 per day to 10,000 and it just swept across as different countries dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Barton said chess.com is on target to experience five years of growth in three months. In April, 1.5 million joined, compared to the more typical 670,000 new members recorded in January.

Local clubs moved online after their physical locations closed, drawing new members.

There has been a huge flock to chess clubs, Barton said. People can build virtual communities as a way of emulating real life.

The shutdowns meant that most live tournaments that are usually held in arenas, hotel ballrooms and convention halls were canceled, and for most there was no replacement. When the biennial Chess Olympiad a major team event scheduled for August in Moscow was scrubbed until next year, FIDE and chess.com ramped up a concept they had been discussing for years: a new online team event.

They put it together in roughly three weeks, and most of the best grandmasters in the world signed up, save for Magnus Carlsen, who is ranked No. 1 and just finished hosting his own unique online event recently.

Carlsen won that event on May 3, and when it was over, Jan Gustafsson, the grandmaster who was commentating, signed off by thanking fans for watching. He added: Not that you guys have any other choices. Lets face it, theres no other sports going on.

But there is real chess and two days later, the Online Nations Cup began as the richest online team event ever, with the winning team sharing $48,000. It is a double round robin that runs over six days with six teams the United States, China, India, Russia, Europe and one called The Rest of the World. The top two teams meet in the final on Sunday.

There have been a couple of minor glitches, such as when Team Europes Zoom conferencing went down briefly on Day 2. But after four rounds with 24 games per day 12 at a time this tournament, and the Carlsen event before it, have helped to quench a chess enthusiasts thirst.

Theres a lot of games, a lot of drama and thats amazing, a somewhat exhausted Rensch said on Wednesday, after broadcasting the third and fourth rounds. Sometimes it can get a little crazy, but its been super exciting.

Four players from each team compete in each round, seen via webcam in their offices, bedrooms and kitchens. The format is rapid chess with the same 25-minute time control used in world championship tiebreakers. The starting time was designed to accommodate so many different times zones: Rensch is in his studio in Phoenix, ready to broadcast before play begins at 6 a.m. there, but for the players in China, it is 9 p.m. when play starts.

Each team has a captain Garry Kasparov, the former world champion, captains Europe and they decide each days roster. One woman must play in each round for each team, and each team also has one male and one female alternate.

Involving women in tournaments like this is a great idea, Dinara Saduakassova, a former junior champion, wrote in an email before her first match for the World team on Wednesday. I would like to see more and more girls and women playing chess.

Her opponent in that first match was the U.S.s Irina Krush, who played from her home in Brooklyn. Saduakassova is playing from her home in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, where she set up a mobile router as backup. Wi-Fi is as important to these events as bases on a baseball diamond.

Anish Giri, a Dutch grandmaster playing from his parents home in Rijswijk, the Netherlands, said that he is obsessed with his connectivity.

I was playing in a smaller online tournament and the Wi-Fi went out, Giri said in a telephone interview recently. I was furious. I did a lot of research and I upgraded everything. Now my Wi-Fi is absolutely insane.

Another key issue is fair play. No one expects the top players to cheat, but FIDE and chess.com, which invest heavily in anti-cheating methods, still must ensure the integrity of the tournament. So, an arbiter and a proctor are assigned to monitor every player, and multiple cameras can show every angle, including all the laptop screens, at all times.

At live tournaments, players are permitted to walk around and go to the bathroom, but in online competitions players are all but glued to their laptops. That affected the tactics in at least one game.

I was just trying to play as quickly as possible because I kind of had to use the restroom, Caruana told Rensch in an interview after his win over Gujrathi.

There are other subtle differences, too. Some of the intensity is lost in online chess with opponents sitting thousands of miles apart.

Dvorkovich, the FIDE president who is also the captain of the World team, said that makes it harder for some players to concentrate.

We are missing the emotional part when people meet and shake hands, Dvorkovich said. People love when they look over the board into the eyes of their opponent. People are missing that. But this is a very good substitute.

It has been for millions of amateurs, too.

Link:

Chess Thrives Online Despite Pandemic - The New York Times

The TD Show

This weeks The TD Show topic will be Triple Occurrence of Position and will air at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific on Thursday, May 14 on the US Chess Twitch channel at twitch.tv/uschess.

The show will be hosted by NTD Chris Bird and this weeks guest will be NTD Brian Yang. We will discuss triple occurrence of position claims, commonly known as three-fold repetition, Chapter 1, Section 14C of the US Chess Rules. Well go over the claims procedure, understanding when a valid claim is being made, verifying the claim and many other important aspects along with providing some examples of valid and invalid claims.

For folks tuning in live, Twitch will provide some interaction between the show and the audience, allowing you to ask questions in real-time and well also finish each episode with some light-hearted fun in the form of trivia based on the topic discussed. However, if you cannot tune in live, each episode will be archived in the TD Videos playlist at the US Chess YouTube Channel.

Replay last weeks episode here:

Originally posted here:

The TD Show Episode 3 - Triple Occurrence of Position - uschess.org

In case you missed them, see Part 1: An introductionand Part 2:Indian origin of chess

The investigation into a probable Chinese origin of chess has been the subject of a lesser degree of depth in comparison to a possible Indian origin. European researchers, particularly the British, did not ignore that chess was present in China in very ancient times, but always subordinated its existence to a previous game:chaturanga. In that sense, a French researcher, Louis Dubois,[1] argued in the nineteenth century that the game would have entered China from India, relying on astatement fromthe Ha-Pine a massivedictionary which ensures that xiang-qientered China during the mandate ofemperor Vou-ty in the year 537 of the Christian era.[2]

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Without even entering into the analysis to determine the sequence of transmission between the Indian and Chinese cultures, it can be noted that, sharing an ancient tradition, the games in both cases originally appeared as similes of a battle. Although they could be also ascribed to higher planes: metaphysical, philosophical and religious.

Under this perspective, according to English sinologist Joseph Needham,[3] who is considered to be the precursor in assigning the paternity of chess to xiang-qi (still practiced massively in China), the game had a ritual nature. In this context the board that is used, most probably intimately linked to the surface where the ancient liubo[4] was developed, could be seen at the same time likea calendar or as an oracle it responded to the ancestral techniques of fortune tellers.

Xiang-qi is explicitly mentioned for the first time in the year 569 of the Christian era in a text titled Xiang Jing (Xiang Game Manual), attributed toEmperor Wu Di (561-578) of the northern[5] Zhu dynasty, who would also bethe inventor of the game. The prologue of the text was written byWeng Pao this prologueis the only conserved partof the text, of which there exists an English translation by Dennis Leventhal.[6]

We are in the presence of the first treatise referred to any of the known proto-chess variants. Compared with the earlier Indian and Persian texts that could have a similar didactic objective, it is much more precise since, for example, in its own title the game is mentioned. Although its contentis not known in detail, it is supposed to include technical concepts and discussionson the implicit high values of the game from the philosophical, cultural andmoral perspectives. For instance, it is suggested that when one has a position of honour one must be humble and, always on a plane of elevation, it ensuresthat the pieces represent celestialbodies of the cosmos.

In the same vein, a few years later the text known asHsiang Hsi Fu appears, a manuscript authoredby Yu Hsin, where the focus is again on the fact thatemperor Wu Di is owed a game that symbolizes all the phenomena of human existence.

In attempting to determine the origin ofxiang-qi, it is usually held that it is derived from another older autochthonous game,liubo.[7] But Cazaux[8] disagrees with this thesis because, although he does not rule out some kind of influence, since, for example, both are disputed on the same type of surface, he arguesthat in any caseliubo operated like a contributorin the syncretic conception of chess, along withashtpada andpetteia, soits link withxiang-qi would be ratherindirect.

Statuettes probably from the first to the second century of the Christian era representing two players disputing a game of liubo. | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

There are several possible translations to the ideogram that represents the term xiang-qi (hsiang-chi).One of the best known, although it would be linguistically not very correct, is elephant chess, referring strangelyto a piece that, participating in the battle, is not the main one. For several sinologists, however, the most appropriate translation is symbolic chess or image chess.

It is necessary to emphasize that qi means game (it is the same suffix that appears for example in wei-qi), although it is also more specificallyassociated to chess. It was also indicated that xiang-qi can be translated as ivory chess (alluding to the material that pieces are made of, or, again, due toits link with the elephant) or chancellor chess (alluding in thiscase to one of the main pieces).

David Li adds two more possible translations: as the term is so phonetically close to ciang, which means general,we could call itgeneral's chess (the main piece in combat); and another more suggestive, game to capture Xiang, which is the name of the commander of the losing army in thebattle that led to the foundation of the empirebuilt under the dominions of the Han Dynasty.

It should be borne in mind that, in addition to shaping a playful structure in which a battle is represented, inxiang-qi we are also in the presence of an agonal struggle (or should we call ita struggle of complementarity?) between the Taoist concepts of yin and yang (Heaven and Earth) that come from the millennial I Ching. The link is quite narrow if one considers that thereare 64squares onthe board, a number that perfectly coincides with the amount of hexagrams that form the base of the system of ideas inThe Book of the Mutations, which refers to the old Chinese calendar as noted by Jing Fan inthe first century before Christ.

Image of the 64 hexagrams of I Ching

Chinese chess received little attention from Western investigators in earlier times, perhaps because of a certain closure of that culture, which did not favour foreign scrutiny and thus was notthe subject of a systematic investigation, contrasting with the Indian version of chess. Furthermore,there wasadditional difficulty in ascribingxiang-qias a proto-chess variant, given the obvious differences in its design: it is not disputed on a 8x8 board but on a8x9 board (in its centre, there is a horizontal line called river, which looks somewhat extravagant); the pieces do not have the form of statuettes, but they are circular tokens (which can prompt us toconfuse it with some version of go); the pieces are located on the jointsand not atthe centre of the squares; the number of pawns is five, instead of eight;and there are two pieces that are absolutely atypical: the archer and the catapult.

However, when delving into its essential characteristics, it is clear that the similaritiesare much more relevant than the dissimilarities: it is played by two persons; the board is formed by 64 squares; the objective is to catch the leader of the rival force (the general[9] who can only move within a small space called the palace); there are 16 pieces for each participant; many of which are idiosyncratic: pawns,horses,elephants,chariots, which have the same movements as in, for example,chaturanga.

A legitimate question, first timidly drawn, but which has gained more strength over time, is whetherxiang-qi is a derivative of Indian chess or whether the reverse is true. More recently, another suggestive alternative has been drawn: that they may have emerged concomitantly, in time, and of course independently, in space. In any case, the Chinese version of the game is undoubtedlypart of a family that has a common root, from which chess was derived as it would come to be known later. What is still undetermined is whether it was the initial or intermediate link in the chain of creation.

The findings of further investigations may have unexpected consequences: researchers who once embraced the Indian theorymutated their position, and now understand that it is the Chinese who are owed the paternity of chess. This has happened, for example, with the Macedonian Pavle Bidev,[10]who changed his mindbasically due tothe dates of the first text of each culture with references to chess year 569 in the Chinese case (that of Wan Pao) and year621 in the Indian case (that of Ba).[11]

Image of the board showing the starting position inxiang-qi

Looking for literary referencesto the game, Leventhal points out that, on a poetic level, inThe Man of P'a-ch'iung[12]it is stated that, after an extraordinary frost, only two giant tangerine trees survived and, in the interior of theirfruits,we see two eldersvery concentrated playing hsiang-hsi.[13] The author of this beautiful story is Niu Seng-ju (780-848), who became Emperor Wu Zong's prime minister of the powerful Tang dynasty. He is also said to have authoredHs-kuai Lu (Accounts of Mysteries and the Supernatural), where the pieces that are used in the game are described theywere made of gold and bronze.

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The terms xiang and qi, although separately, had been frequently mentioned in earlier times.It is believed that for the first time in Chu Ci (Songs of Chu)of Qu Yuan (known as the Homer of the Orient), a text that would have been written inthe third century beforeChrist.Since the textalso includes a reference toliubo (played with pieces of ivory and a dice made of bamboo), it is not entirely clear if itconsidersthe existence of differentiated games or if it only alludes to one of them. Later mentions, such as one found in Shuo Yan (Garden of Stories),[14]a work from the second century BC, should also be considered as inconclusive.

Chinese professor David Li, in his award-winning 1998 book in which he discusses in detail the origin of his country's idiosyncratic chess, has allowed himself to claim thatxiang-qi goes back to the third century BC, that isto a time in which there were intense fights between neighbouring kingdoms whichwere the prolegomenon tothe unification of the territory. This is a period called "The Warring States".During this period, an episode whichhasGeneral Han Xin(who served King Liu Bang, future emperor of the country) as the main character is retold. The general,in the course of the hard winter of years 204-203 in the pre-Christian era, might have invented the gameto distract the troops and thus alleviate the adverse conditions, while his army was preparing to fighta battle that would ultimatelybe decisive.[15]Thedesign of the game would have been inspired byliubo[16] and wei-ki. However, it is also admitted, perhaps more appropriately, that although the game was probably invented in a later time, already duringthe Christian era, the image that was used when the game was conceivedcould have been precisely that of this battle,considered to be epic and foundational.

Indeed, already in 1793, Eyles Irwin[17] had presented not only the possibility of the Chinese origin of chess but also associated its initial milestone to a battle that was disputed "about two centuries before the Christian era"and led by Hansing (Han Xin), who was considered to bethe inventor of the game.The well-known Irish writer addsthe subsequent sequence of transmission of the game from this territory: to the West, first to Persia, and only later to India, throughthe Silk Route; and to the East, successivelyto Korea and Japan.[18] Moreover,the exceptionality of indicating a precise date of invention the year 174 BC is included.

Li's position is acidly questioned byGerman researcher Peter Banaschak[19] who considers that we are in the presence of a mere story avery well told and perhaps persuasive storythat, however, is not adjusted to the reality of events, as it does not rely on historiographical or scientific elements, and thusconsidered to belong to thefictional realm.

A game of xiang-qi (and a western observer, the author of this work), at Tiantan Gongyuan Park (near the Temple of Heaven), Beijing, October 2013 |Photo: Hugo Orlando Lopez

Besidesthis critical exercise, in another work[20] of the German researcher, which assumes more ofa proactive tone, after studying the term xiang-qi carefully, he analyses punctually the different chronologies in which the game could haveappeared in China. Some very distant theories are discarded at once based ontheir temporal inconsistency, like thosegoing back to times of legendary emperors.Such is the case of the theory that relates to Shennong, who governed between centuries XXVIII andXXVII before Christ, according to what was later exposed in the XIV century by a Buddhist monk named Nianchang;or the onefocusedon his successor Huangdi, the famous Yellow Emperor, creator of the game according to Zhao Buzhi, who lived betweencenturies XII and XI. Both hypotheses seem to correspond rather to the field of the mythological.

Banaschak also considersLi'ssuggestionthat the game arose in China in the third century BC. But Banaschak chooses instead tolocate the birth of the game in the sixth century, already in the Christian era, noting that in any casexiang-qi is not original of China but ratheran adaptationfrom either the Indian chaturanga or the Persian atrang.

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However, and to show that the hypothesis of a Chinese origin of chess remains valid, it should be remembered that the first texts of that origin, in which a reference to xiang-qiis made, are earlier and far more specific than those coming from India referring tochaturanga. On the other hand, the archaeological findings in both territories are not too conclusive, andthose that have appeared in the context of the Silk Route could be linkedboth for the Indianand the Chinese theories. To make the situation even more complex, it could evenbe speculated that both games, instead of being interdependent, and therefore admitting an order of priority among them, could have arisenconcomitantly and isolated from each other. Therefore, those who support thatchess comes from Chinastill have a wide open space to strengthen their central theory, in the framework of a primordial question that is far frombeing solved.

For the moment, let us remember a beautiful poem that Argentine writer Alberto Laiseca[21] dedicated to xiang-qi, which begins thus: "In the chess of my land there is a cannon. / It does notattack the adversary simply. / Never something so direct. / It takes as an excuse an intermediate chessman; / regardless of whether it iscomrade orinvasor. / Because the cannon cannotshootthe walls straight, but over them... ".[22]

These verses correspond to Ajedrez de pas central (Chess of Central Country). And, in fact, China has really been, at all times, a Central Country! So central that the world of chess could come to recognize, sooner than later, that it was in that immense and millennial territory that the flame of a game that captivated Humanity was once first lit.

[2] It is very possible that the reference is to the emperor Wu Di, of whom it is spoken later, reason why the date could be slightly incorrect.

[4] The wise Confucius (550-470 BC) is credited with this reference: "It is difficult for a man who always has a full stomach to put his mind into operation. And the players of liubo and weiqi? Even playing these games is better than being idle". Wei-qi is the antecedent ofgo, the other great millennial game that, likechess (and xiang-qi!), transcended the boundaries of time.

[5] For those who hold the Indian theory, this temporal location is considered as another proofthat favours their position since, at this time, there was the maximum expansion of Buddhism in China, a religion that had entered from the neighbouring territory.

[7] Its existence goes back to at least the fourth century BC although, for instance the historian Sima Qian (145-90 BC) in Shj (Historical records), the first systematic approach to Chinese history, mentions allegorically the episode of Emperor Shang Wu Yi,who ruled between 1198 and 1194 BCand, trusting his omnipotence, wanted to playliubo against God himself. This game had wide diffusion, but it lost popularity towards the century VI AD, just when xiang-qi gained strength. Liubo means "six sticks" its rules are rather unknown, although there are efforts to reconstruct them. It would be a racing game, that includeda general and five pawns (it has even been assured that they were actually fish, stones and owls). Note the correspondence with the xiang-qi, where there are only five pawns and not eight as in other proto-chess versions. As the main square of this game was called water, it is believed that from there derives the row assigned to the river on the board in which Chinese chess is practised.

[9] Inchaturanga the main piece is the King. The same thing happens in almost all the previous and later proto-chess variants of the whole Eastern tradition and also European. But the Chinese case is different becausewhat was expected does not happen: the Emperor does not appear as a chessman. This has an explanation: according to a legend quoted by Pujol Nicholas, originallyxiang-qiused such a piece,but it stopped doing so from the momentan Emperor of the real world, when learning that in a game one of the players had captured the strongest piece of his opponent, decided to execute them both. An instinct of survival of future game enthusiasts in the context offear of the sovereign, made the Emperor disappear as a figure ofxiang-qi, symbolically increasing its relevance since its absence should not be interpreted as an omission but as a sign of reverential respect.

[10] Source: How I reorientated my chess beliefs; Yu Igalo, 1987.

[11] Bidev adds another detail when he says that, atthe moment Emperor Harsha dies in India in 648, there was only a proto-chess variant:chaturanga. On the other hand, when his Chinese counterpart Tsung died two years later, there were three different versions; in the times of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), when Su-Ku-Siang King publishes Su-Ku-Siang (Manual of the three games Siang), this is the case.

[12] It is the name of a region in the present Chinese province of Sichuan.

[13] This is another way of denoting the game of xiang-qi.

[14] Shuo Yuan is a text that was presented to King Liu Xiang in the 17th year of the pre-Christian era, which includes the reference: "Meng Changjun played Xiangqi and danced with Mrs. Zheng".

[15] Note that this story has many similarities with the one that supportsthe possibility that chess had been invented in the context of the Siege of Troy.

[16] Li locates the origins ofliuboback invery old times, perhaps to the XXIII century before Christ.

[17] Irwin, who was born in Calcutta, India, worked for the British in the East. This thesis was sustained in a letter addressed to the Count of Charlemont, the President of the Royal Irish Academy, written in the city of Canton on March 14, 1793. He speculated that the Chinese game went to Persia where, in addition to introducing to the vizier as a piece, the river wasremoved from the board, which was resolved taking into account the dry nature prevailing in that region, at https://archive.org/details/jstor-30078706. In the same vein, a few years earlier (in 1789),English lawyer Daines Barrington hadissued an article favouring the theory that chess entered Tibet and Hindustan from China (Source: British Miscellany and Chess Player's Chronicle, Volume 1, R. Hastings, 1841).

[18]Sam Sloan, an American scholar who also plays xiang-qi very well, waseven more precise. Sharing the idea of Chinese primacy, he understands that the routes of propagation tookplace in all possible directions: to Japan, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia (and through the island of Java to Sumatra), by the Eastern side; and, through Uzbekistan, through the Silk Route, to Afghanistan and Persia, and then arrive to the Arab world (and later to Europe), to Ethiopia and to India, which, as we see, remains in a range completely peripheral. In this regard, Sloan comes to speculate that in the Indian subcontinent the game entered perhaps more than a millennium after its invention in China. In doing so, he wonders how, having texts in Sanskrit dating back to 1500 BC, there are no references about any proto-chess variants in India until only more recentperiods. Source: The origin of chess by Sam Sloan, at http://www.anusha.com/origin.htm.

[22] En el ajedrez de mi tierra existe un can. /No ataca simplemente al adversario. /Jams algo tan directo. /Toma como excusa un trebejo intermedio; /con independencia de si es camarada o valor invasor. /Porque el can no sirve para disparar contra las murallas, sino por sobre ellas.... Thus reads the original text in Spanish.

See the article here:

On the origins of chess (3/5) - Chessbase News

Written by Sandip G | New Delhi | Updated: May 14, 2020 1:51:49 pm A screenshot of the FIDE Online Nations Cup match between Chinas Ding Liren and the United Statess Hikaru Nakamura.

It was around midnight in Beijing that Chinese Grandmaster Wei Yi broke into a rueful smile, as his American opponent Fabiano Caruana, sitting in his beachside house in Miami, where it was just noon, killed a thrilling faceoff with a slick end-game manoeuvre. The victory left the FIDE Online Nations Cup super-final locked in a 2-2 draw, though China were declared winners as they had won the round-robin phase.

The four Chinese GrandmastersYi, Ding Liren, Hou Yifan and Yu Yangyiappeared briefly for a video conference on the ChessBase website, that was live-streaming the week-long tournament. Following on the livestream, their eyes looked sleepy but beaming, the voices sounded happy but drowsy to all who followed them online. Their American counterparts were dreary and downcast, though Caruana later lifted the gloom with his characteristic humour.

Bafflingly, despite the mounting friction between the two countries, the Chinese victoryor the American defeatwas not lost in political symbolism, layering and interpretations. Like when the Cold War was raging, and the Soviet chess machine was meant to demonstrate mental and athletic primacy over the decadent West. Here, even if you take the Trump administrations swelling antagonism of China, the accusations and castigations that had flown from the White House to Beijing in the last few weeks, tropes of ideological victory or metaphors of global domination werent woven into Chinas triumph. For all what it was, the context didnt leap out of the 64 squares on the board. There was no political rhetoric.

It was as Garry Kasparov, agonisingly watching Team Europe plunge in the tournament, said after the final: Solely the moment to acknowledge China as a superpower in chess. They have an exceptional generation of quality players. Maybe, one of them could be a future world champion.

A few weeks ago, in an entirely different context, the legendary chess player had criticised the country: China will have to be held to account, and their free world enablers too. Past time to end the one-way street of engagement of dictatorships with the free world, exporting corruption and death along with oil and goods. But here, he had kept the politics out of the board.

Whether one of their golden generation could wrestle the crown and sceptre from Magnus Carlsen (still only 29) has to be seen, but China has been making rapid strides in the game. Long ago chess was banned by Beijing for the first eight years of the Cultural Revolution.

Then in 1975 the Malaysian patron Dato Tan, in partnership with Chinese officials, conceived and financed the Big Dragon project to make China a global chess power. Its model was the USSRs state-run strategy in the 1930s and 40s, spotting players at a young age and putting them into the right climate to blossom. The state nourishes and develops them from childhood, carefully grooms them for the international arena, and handsomely awards them when they start yielding results, which they have been steadily accomplishing.

First China captured the womens world title from the previously dominant Georgians, before they advanced in the biennial team Olympiad until winning it in 2014. Finally, after many years when Chinese grandmasters stalled in the top 20 or 30, they found Ding, who has a classical and dynamic playing style. Apart from the third-ranked Ding, they have three more in the top-25. Only Russia has more. And unlike the USAs talent pool, Chinas is entirely home-grown.

READ | Chess greats face off online, webcams watch moves

As much as the outcome of the tournament was a symbol of Chinas emergence as a chess superpower, it was a metaphor of hope in these trying times. When the pandemic and lockdown shuttered the sporting world, chess managed to conduct a tournament featuring the best of the world, barring Carlsen, who had just finished hosting his own online tournament recently.

Yifan candidly put the overwhelming emotion of the chess fraternity into words: Im actually more excited about that we are here. Under this global climate, it is very important that we are trying to bring up something together that makes chess somehow lift in the air. This is I guess a privilege for chess, that we can do a lot of different events online. I certainly had a lot of fun, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

It was fun, but it also required a lot of adapting and adjusting, for players, organisers, audience and arbiters. They had just three weeks to organise and prepare, and though it was not exactly a plunge into the unknown, it posed a whole new set of challenges.

Like Team Europes Zoom conferencing conked out briefly on the second day. Dutch Grandmaster Anish Giri was so worried about his internet connection that he spent the week leading up to the tournament fishing out methods to keep the connection stable. I was playing in a smaller online tournament and the Wi-Fi went out. I was furious. I did a lot of research and I upgraded everything. Now my Wi-Fi is absolutely insane, he told ChessBase.com.

To nail the wobbly connection, Dinara Saduakassova, playing from her home in Nur-Sultan, set up two mobile routers as a backup. We have a lot of unannounced power cuts in the city. So its better to keep the mobile-phones ready. Its a saviour, she said.

READ | Anand rested, India lose to China in Online Nations Cup

For Italian-American Caruana, a bigger problem was that he couldnt go to the bathroom between rounds. To keep the integrity of the tournament and prevent cheating allegations, FIDE had insisted on players not moving from the chairs, which means they cant move from where they are sitting and there are multiple cameras gazing at you.

The urge forced him to play quicker against Indian Grandmaster Vidit Gujrathi. I was just trying to play as quickly as possible because I kind of had to use the restroom. I just wanted the match to get over as fast as possible and I literally ran to the rest-room, he said in the post-match interview.

For many of them, the adjustment was physical. Playing someone whos sitting miles away, staring into a virtual board and the head of your opponent blinkering from the corner of the screen. Admitted Indias B Adhiban: Its like youre playing a computer. The whole intensity and body language are missing. You get used to it, but you miss that human element. Though you ideally like to play in quieter environments, you miss your opponents face. Its not fake, but as Caruana noted: Its like playing someone from a parallel universe.

The emotional face of the game was missed. We are missing the emotional part when people meet and shake hands. People love when they look over the board into the eyes of their opponent. People are missing that. But this is a very good substitute, said FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich. He though could not imagine a China-US finale in a real tournament. That would have been sensational, he said. It could have been the perfect storm too, where political symbolism and posturing would not have been too far away.

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Enter the dragon, in black and white: China win Online Nations Cup - The Indian Express

DOCE is super easy to learn. You can read the rules in five minutes, and you can teach the game in less.

You need one playing grid, two sets of dice, and two markers. Thats it. The rulebook and a score tracker come with the game, but thats not essential if you want to keep score on paper and if you know all the rules.

And then you follow these simple steps:

Place a die on any available square.

Attempt to make a line of four of your own dice or three of your dice and one of your opponents at the end of the line.

Score points based on the state of the board when someone wins.

Play four rounds of the game.

Total the points from the four rounds and declare a winner.

So what makes it different from something like Hasbros Connect 4?

Well, there are some additional rules to consider that take DOCE to the next level of complexity and enable some exciting gameplay.

When a player places a die on the grid, they must also place the marker on top of it. This marker signifies the last die placed, but it also informs the player of the no-play zone. On the next turn, the player cannot place their die in any of the adjacent squares. This effectively cuts off anywhere between three and eight grid placements on the next turn. And it prevents a player from simply placing the die in a straight line one after the other.

That limitation means that this game doesnt end as quickly or as inelegantly as a game of tic-tac-toe or Connect 4. Players have to think in advance how they want to approach the game board, and it requires more finesse and more tactical awareness.

And, beyond that, there is also the blocker die. This die is a special one-time use for players, and it eliminates the square it is played on. This means you can thwart the progress your opponent has made toward a completed line.

Also, when you use the blocker die, it can be played anywhere on the board (including the no-play zone) and you get to play a numbered die afterward as normal.

Its a powerful mechanic that further increases the time and strategy of the game.

I liked a lot of things about DOCE.

Playing over four rounds meant that one mistake or unfortunate round could be countered later in another round. It lengthened the time spent playing and it made good victories feel more important. Losing a 20-point round wasnt as discouraging when I had just won a 35-point round prior to that. It gives players multiple chances to succeed and makes it feel like a mini-tournament or best-of kind of competition.

Like chess in the park, DOCE is a game that you can enjoy just about anywhere while having a good conversation with the person sitting across from you. There is enough strategy to stimulate the brain, but the small-box dice duel doesnt weigh heavily on you as you play. Its light but tough. Small but cunning.

And there are also variants that you can try out to add new twists to the gameplay.

Master Die has players, at the start of each round, roll a die the resulting number is off-limits for the duration of the round.

Luck of the Roll requires players to roll 3 of their dice at the beginning of a turn and those are the only options available to put down.

Hard Mode places one of the blocker die into the middle square of the grid and removes the other one from play.

Think Ahead means that every die a player places must be higher in number than the previous one, with the placement of a 6 resetting the count.

There are also modified modes of some variants that add different rules.

So for such a small game, there is a lot in DOCE that strategy lovers and tabletop enthusiasts will like. Its easy enough for everyone, including kids, to enjoy.

And its fun.

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DOCE Review: A Clever Dice Duel To Take On Chess And Other Games - GameTyrant

Nirmal Das had on March 28 launched an online chess tournament out of sheer boredom induced by the coronavirus-related lockdown.

The intention of this 39-year-old civil engineer in Tripuras Public Works Department was to connect with dozen-odd players of the board game in his hometown and State capital Agartala. In 44 days, the fee-free tournament, played across four formats, has 975 participants from across the globe and counting.

Some tournament regulars are from countries like Brazil, Germany, South Korea and the Philippines. Many foreign and Indian participants have a Fdration Internationale des checs or FIDE rating of more than 2,000, a benchmark for quality players.

Chess has been my passion, though not of the digital kind. Boredom because of staying indoors during the initial days of lockdown made me log on to lichess.org, a chess portal. The idea of an online tournament on this platform struck me and I decided to give it a try, Mr .Das told The Hindu on Sunday.

The tournament started with 15 local enthusiasts, including his son who had participated at the Under-7 nationals in 2019. About 70 players from Agartala signed up in less than a week followed by 80 more from Assam and other north-eastern States.

Chess lovers from Delhi, Karnataka and other States soon joined and the number swelled to 450. It kept getting bigger as players from Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, South Korea, Germany, Brazil and other countries joined, he said.

At 75 years, Anju Sarkar, a former Tripura chess champion, is a regular at these online tournaments and is the oldest player.

Mr. Das has set a condition for Indian participants: download the corona tracker first. The entry of foreign participants is unconditional.

Mr. Das initially conducted the tournament twice a day. With many countries easing the lockdown, it is now being conducted once at 8 p.m.

The duration for the tournament for the bullet, blitz and rapid chess tournaments is 2 hours. For classical chess, it is 2 hours 30 minutes. The top seven performers get featured on the honours list every day.

The four types of chess tournaments are held by rotation. For instance, Sakhawat Hussain of Karnataka won the 68th Lockdown Online International Chess tournament of the classical type on Friday followed by Aisha Wadhwani of Haryana while Ronaldo Luis of Brazil took the fifth spot, Mr. Das said.

On Saturday, Snehaal Roy of Assam, a Class VI student with a FIDE rating of 1,252 won the rapid tournament followed by Kingshuk Debnath of Tripura. Rafi Islam of Bangladesh took the sixth spot.

On May 8, Mr. Das restarted the daytime tournament for 2 hours but only for beginners, part-timers and those who had lost touch with the mind game on a 64-square board.

What excites me is that I have been able to provide a platform where any chess player can play against any other, with or without FIDE ranking, Mr. Das said.

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Tripura engineers online chess tournament gets players from around the world - The Hindu

There's more news about GMHikaru Nakamura this week, as the American grandmaster won the May 12 edition ofTitled Tuesdaywith 9.5/10, finishing ahead of the Iranian prodigy Alireza Firouzjaand 1,083 other participants.

The next Titled Tuesday will be played on May 19 at 10 a.m. Pacific / 19:00 Central Europe.

Nakamura almost never skips Titled Tuesday. Besides, among many other participants, in recent months he invariably streams his play on his channel as well. The question of whether this streaming is affecting his chess is an old one and related to Nakamura's drop in Elohe is now the world number-18 at 2736 and 80 points below his all-time peak.

Yesterday @Hikaru showed that he's capable of playing online chess to his own high standards while commenting on it. He won the tournament alone with 9.5/10, the same score as the last time he won, on June 4, 2019. It was the 10th time he has won Titled Tuesday, which is a record.

He dropped half a point in the third round in a long game with Indian GM @VishnuPrasanna. He was winning out of the opening, then even more, but somehow Vishnu came back and was even briefly winning himself. In a completely level endgame, Nakamura tried for a bit, but the draw was inevitable.

But that was it. The night belonged to Nakamura as he won the next seven games in a row to reach 9.5/10, which nobody else managed. Here's his last-round game againstGM @Oleksandr_Bortnyk, a blitz specialist who won Titled Tuesday with a perfect 9/9 on October 4, 2016.

The fans were also thrilled about the participation of Firouzja, who had been absent for a while. The Iranian prodigy suffered an early loss in round three but was still playing for the marbles in the final round after six straight wins. His faced Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (@Azerichess), who blundered a full piece in an equal endgame:

Nakamura wonthe $750 first prize for finishing clear first with 9.5/10. Firouzja shared the second place only with GM Le Quang Liem (@LiemLe); both earned $275. A group of 10 players got their $10 share of the $100 fourth prize.GM @KaterynaLagno won the $100 prize for the best female player.

May 12, 2020 Titled Tuesday | Final Standings (Players on 8.5 or more)

(Full final standings here.)

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Nakamura Streams, Wins Titled Tuesday Ahead Of Firouzja - Chess.com