Carlsen-Anand: Post Mortem

Today, as I expect most readers of this blog know already, Magnus Carlsen won the 11th game of his match with Viswanathan Anand to retain his world championship title. The final score of the match was 6½-4½ (+3 – 1 =7 for Carlsen). What can I say? I think the...

Queen and Bishop versus Two Rooks

A couple days ago I read this in Wikipedia’s entry called Chess endgame: Queen and bishop versus two rooks. This was thought to be a draw [before computer tablebases — DM] but the queen and bishop usually win. It takes up to 84 moves. This got me curious....

Carlsen-Anand: A Mathematical Analysis

Today a seismic shift happened in the world championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Viswanathan Anand. Vishy finally won a game! Last year, you might remember, Carlsen defeated Anand without even losing a single game. Even though Anand went into the match as the...