Recap of games 3, 4 and 5 of the Women's World Championship

These rules are novel and the game is both fun and deep. Make sure you read the rules before playing!

My son asked me how to castle on chess.com the other day, and I found that I couldn't do it the way I normally do. Picking up the king and trying to move it to c1 just caused it to move to d1 instead, every time. I tried walking backwards and redoing a few different moves before this, and that all worked, but it just refused to let me castle by moving the king. Neither the king nor the rook had moved yet, and there was no potential or existing check involved, so what gives? Is there some other rule I'm just not aware of?

Sorry I didn't get a shot of the board as well, I thought I had but I can't find it on my phone now.

Edit: Missed the bishop. Option 2 it is, then.

Levy Rozman aka GothamChess covers the first two games of the Women's World Championship

I have wide swings in my ELO on chess.com. My highest is 1425. I’m typically 1350. But I’ll nosedive into large slumps sometimes.

I have a much harder time if I slump below 1200 than if I stay in my usual 1300 range.

Has anyone else experienced this? I have some theories:

• New accounts start at 1200 so you might have people who are really good but their ELO is not cemented yet.

• Weird chess. The 1300 is playing more principled moves so there is less calculation in the opening. I’ve seen it before. The lower players are playing weird moves that require constant calculating.

• Aggressive queen moves that I can sometimes punish, but again require way more calculating early than a 1300 who keeps their Q safe for longer.

I enjoyed it, so I thought I'd share 🙂

After much speculation, both Carlsen and Nakamura will participate in the World Cup from July 29th to August 25th. The most notable absences are World Champion Ding Liren, Alireza Firouzja and Levon Aronian. Aronian cited concerns about the tournament being held in Azerbaijan.

The SuperUnited Rapid & Blitz is the third tournament and midway point of the Grand Chess Tour, taking place in Zagreb, Croatia.

Format

10 players tournament.

The rapid portion takes part the first three days, consisting in a single round-robin with 3 rounds each day. The time control is 25+10. Rapid games count double.

The blitz portion takes part the last 2 days, in a double round-robin. The time control is 5+2.

Players

1. Magnus Carlsen (2835, Norway)
2. Fabiano Caruana (2782, USA)
3. Ian Nepomniachtchi (2779, FIDE)
4. Alireza Firouzja (2777, France)
5. Viswanathan Anand (2754, India)
6. Richard Rapport (2752, Romania)
7. Gukesh D (2744, India)
8. Jan-Krzysztof Duda (2732, Poland)
9. Ivan Saric (2657, Croatia)
10. Constantin Lupulescu (2582, Romania)

Standings

(after round 9 Rapid)

Links

• Lichess
• chess.com
• chess24
• Twitch channel
• YouTube channel

Changelog (from their GitHub repo):

Quality of chess play

Stockfish continues to demonstrate its ability to discover superior moves with remarkable speed. In self-play against Stockfish 15, this new release gains up to 50 Elo and wins up to 12 times more game pairs than it loses. In major chess engine tournaments, Stockfish reliably tops the rankings winning the TCEC season 24 Superfinal, Swiss, Fischer Random, and Double Random Chess tournaments and the CCC 19 Bullet, 20 Blitz, and 20 Rapid competitions. Leela Chess Zero was the challenger in most finals, putting top-engine chess now firmly in the hands of teams embracing free and open-source software.

Progress made

This updated version of Stockfish introduces several enhancements, including an upgraded neural net architecture (SFNNv6), improved implementation, and refined parameterization. The ongoing utilization of Leela’s data combined with a novel inference approach exploiting sparsity, and network compression ensure a speedy evaluation and modest binary sizes while allowing for more weights and higher accuracy. The search has undergone more optimization, leading to improved performance, particularly in longer analyses. Additionally, the Fishtest framework has been improved and is now able to run the tests needed to validate new ideas with 10000s of CPU cores.

Usability improvements

Stockfish now comes with documentation, found in the wiki folder when downloading it or on GitHub. Additionally, Stockfish now includes a clear and consistent forced tablebase win score, displaying a value of 200 minus the number of plies required to reach a tablebase win. Furthermore, the UCI_Elo option, to reduce its strength, has been calibrated. It is worth noting that the evaluation system remains consistent with Stockfish 15.1, maintaining the choice that 100cp means a 50% chance of winning the game against an equal opponent. Finally, binaries of our latest development version are now provided continuously as pre-releases on GitHub making it easier for enthusiasts to download the latest and strongest version of the program, we thank Roman Korba for having provided a similar service for a long time.

Thank you

The success of the Stockfish project relies on the vibrant community of passionate enthusiasts (we appreciate each and every one of you!) who generously contribute their knowledge, time, and resources. Together, this dedicated community works towards the common goal of developing a powerful, freely accessible, and open-source chess engine. We invite all chess enthusiasts to join the Fishtest testing framework and contribute to the project.

The Stockfish team

If you want to use spaced repetition for studying openings, Listudy.org is the site for you :)

I created this because I like spaced repetition for learning, I have been using anki for studying for exams since years and I wanted to use the same concepts for learning chess. You can find openings to study here or create an account and upload your own studies.

I always appreciate feedback so if you have any please let me know!

Today, Lichess users play more than a million games every day. Lichess is one of the most popular chess websites in the world while remaining 100% free. Most “free” websites subsist by selling ads or selling user data. Others do it by putting all the good stuff behind paywalls. Lichess does none of these things and never will. With no investors demanding profits, Lichess staff can focus on improving the site as their only goal.