‘Chess queen’ stars as world’s best compete in London
puzzle: White failed to win. Can you do better?
Switzerland’s “chess queen”, the former women’s world champion Alexandra Kosteniuk, starred when leading grandmasters competed in two major events in London last week and this.
The 40-year-old scored the winning point in the $1mn Tech Mahindra Global Chess League when she won on time for Triveni Continental Kings against PBG Alaskan Knights. Next, she produced the upset of Monday’s opening round of the €58,000 WR Masters Cup when she defeated Uzbekistan’s world No6 Nodirbek Abdusattorov, who had a winning position but appeared to forget the en passant capture rule at move 32. However, the Uzbek won their return game, then reached the next round after a tiebreak.
Overall, the verdict on the GCL, now in its second season, was mixed. It brought some of the best GMs to London in a highly competitive format, but the time limit of 20 minutes each for the entire game, without any per move increment, produced a strong random element to the results.
Last week’s article related how the world No1, Magnus Carlsen, lost on time in a winning position against the rising talent Alireza Firouzja. In their return game the roles were reversed, as Firouzja’s clock went to 0.00 in a drawn position. In both cases the margin of defeat was approximately one second, as was also the case when China’s Tan Zhongyi overstepped against Kosteniuk.
The GCL’s objective is to popularise chess on television and other mainstream media, but the absence of a genuine geographical identity for the teams is a drawback. Triveni won for the second year running, but fielded only one player who also took part in 2023.
The WR Masters Cup also has an innovatory format. It is a 16-player knockout at slow classical time rates, compressed into four days by games at 10am and 5pm, with an Armageddon tiebreak, where a draw counts as a win for Black, at 10pm.
The Cup, unlike the GCL, had two English participants: the youngest ever UK grandmaster Shreyas Royal, 15, who drew his first game against India’s former world champion Vishy Anand before losing the second, and the nine-year-old prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan, who was outclassed by the world No5 Arjun Erigaisi.
Alleged chess cheating always makes headlines. Last weekend Kirill Shevchenko, the 22-year-old Ukrainian-born, Romanian world No 69, was expelled from the Spanish team championship after being accused of using a cell phone to analyse in the toilet. His results. a win and a draw, were both registered as losses. Shevchenko became a grandmaster at age 14, and is the strongest chess player ever to be sanctioned for cheating.
Perhaps significantly, he also won chess.com’s online Titled Tuesday last week with what was described then as an “impressive” performance.
It is a strange case, not least because many grandmasters compete in national leagues, with fees calculated more by their titles and ratings than by their results in that league’s games or matches. The reward in this alleged case would have been just a few extra rating points against the very real risk, which happened, of an opponent noticing absences from the board and complaining to the arbiter.