Cat-astrophe Chess Video: Must Watch!

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Category-18 Chess in New Delhi with GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek as Top Seed

Former Indian national chess champion 

GM Parimarjan Negi with journalists.

The AIFC-AAI Chess Cup is being held in New Delhi, India from Dec 20-30, according to a press release. The six-player double round-robin format category-18 tournament will be played at the Airport Authority of India Club (AAI) here. his is the second edition of the AICF-AAI Cup, which was a category-17 event last year. The tournament was won by Fabiano Caruana of Italy in its inaugural edition and the player has subsequently moved into the top-10 of the FIDE world rankings.

All India Chess Federation (AICF) secretary Bharat Singh Chauhan said, "The list of players for this tournament is the best line up India have ever seen and we are expecting very tough competition in the ten days of the tournament."

This year's star attraction would be GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek of Poland. Wojtaszek is a top-50 player and would be looking to add valuable rating points to his tally. Leading the charge of challengers against him would be GM Anton Korobov of Ukraine, who boasts of a 2700+ rating and Russia's in-form player GM Evgeny Alekseev.

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Carlsen beats McShane, cracks all time high rating

World number one Magnus Carlsen of Norway cracked all-time high ratings, defeating Luke McShane of England in the first round of the London Chess Classic at the Olympia here.

The rating for Carlsen stood at 2851.2 points in the unofficial live rating portals which means that the Norwegian has cracked the all-time high rating record of 2851 held by former world champion and his former trainer Gary Kasparov of Russia.

On what turned out to be a perfect opener, all the four games in the nine-players round robin tournament ended decisively and the biggest upset was recorded by Hikaru Nakamura of United States who defeated World number two Levon Aronian with black pieces.

With Nakamura calling the shots, Vladimir Kramnik turned out to be another winner of the day at the expense of world's top woman player Judit Polgar of Hungary. The all-decisive-games record was kept intact by a late-benefitting Michael Adams of England against compatriot Gawain Jones. World champion Vishwanathan Anand had a rest day in the opener as he drew number one in the official drawing of lots.

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Anna Ushenina is New Women's World Chess Champion

After a 2-2 deadlock in the normal games, the stage was set for an exciting finale in Khanty Mansiysk, Russia and Ushenina came up triumph winning the second game under rapid time control after the first game had ended in a draw. The Ukrainian won 60000 USD for her efforts in the championship and gets to play the next World Championship against Yifan Hou of China next year as part of the new cycle in the women’s World Championship.

The 64-players championship ended in a tie-break much like the men’s World Championship earlier this year where Vishwanathan Anand won defeating Boris Gelfand of Israel in the rapid tie-break. The Indian challenge in the championship had lasted till the semi-finals where D Harika went down to Stefanova after an intense struggle.

Speaking about the match, Ushenina did not mince words while calling it a gruelling schedule. “The match was very interesting, but we were clearly tired and made many mistakes. In the third and fourth games we exchanged blows -- first I took the lead, then Antoaneta equalised the score. In the first tie-break game white stood better, but I held a draw. In the second game black was slightly worse, but Antoaneta was very short on time, defended inaccurately and gave me a chance to win,” said the new women’s world champion.

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