World Cup Wrap-Up

Today Levon Aronian won both of his 25-minute playoff games against Ding Liren to become the first two-time winner of the World Cup. (He also won in 2005. I’m not including the two earlier World Cups that were held using a different format and only 24 players.)...

KQ versus KR, part two

In my last post, I looked at the K and Q versus K and R endgames, one of the four endgames of the Apocalypse, which occurred in both of the semifinal matches of the World Cup, and I introduced a couple of new ideas or at least new terminology, the “seesaw...

One Little Pebble

Every landslide begins with one little pebble. And then another, and then a few rocks, and then a boulder, and then a whole hillside is moving … That’s what it must have felt like for Alexander Grischuk when he was on the receiving end of an overwhelming,...