4/23/2021 – Rapid interviews are fun: interviewer and guest face each other in an epic rapid chess battle. The chess guest not only has to face the interviewer s questions, but also concentrate on the chess game at the same time. This leads to surprising answers and sometimes to curious chess positions. Svitlana Demchenko tells us why she can speak five languages, What her connection to Biomedical Sciences is, and how she met Ugandan chess player Phiona Mutesi, the Queen of Katwe . Very soon, Svitlana will teach us some smart moves with her new channel on ChessBase, called Svitlana s Smart Moves .
new: Komodo Chess 14
In a commentary for a chess magazine, British chess Grandmaster Nigel Short appealed to neuroscience to support his claim that women’s brains are “hard-wired” in a way that predisposes females to have less innate chess aptitude than their male counterparts.
In essay titled Vive la Différence!” published this week in
Chess In News, Mr. Short writes that Dutch chess Grandmaster Johannes Hendrikus Donner, may have “had a point,” when he wrote, “The difference between the sexes is remarkable in chess, but not any more so, to my mind, than any other field of cultural activity. Women cannot play chess, but they cannot paint either, or write, or philosophise. In fact, women have never thought or made anything worth considering.”
Checkmate.
“The Queen’s Gambit”, a Netflix miniseries about an orphaned chess prodigy during the Cold War Era, took home two awards in the 2021 Golden Globe Awards Sunday night (Monday, March 1 in Manila).
The seven-episode miniseries bagged one of the top awards that include Best Limited Series, Anthology Series or Motion Picture Made for Television. Its main star Anya Taylor-Joy, who played chess prodigy Beth Harmon, also won Best Actress in a Limited Series, Anthology Series or Motion Picture Made for Television, beating Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Shira Haas.
Former Women’s World Chess Champion Susan Polgar congratulated Taylor-Joy and the whole series production for the awards in a social media post while Judit Polgar, generally considered as the strongest female chess player of all time, showed her support to the series in a Twitter post a day before the Awards Night.
Grandmaster Susan Polgar watches on as Grandmaster Yuniesky Quesada (left), from Cuba, and Grandmaster Emilio Cordova, from Peru, work on their chess skills in this snapshot of pre-pandemic training. Quesada and Cordova are members of the Webster University chess team, which has been ranked number one in Division 1 College Chess since its inception.
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| photo courtesy of Webster University
Since its inception in August 2012, the Webster University chess team has ranked number one in Division I college chess. Earlier this year, the team won the 2021 Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship, the foremost college chess tournament in the Americas.Â
Though the team is no stranger to that competition â of the nine years theyâve entered, theyâve won eight â 2021 presented its own challenges. With the coronavirus pandemic still raging across the country, this yearâs training and tournament were conducted entirely online.
The civilised reputation of the chess world has given way to a bitter personality clash as Britain’s most successful grandmaster and one of the game’s most accomplished women argue over each other’s