NICK BARNETT CHESS

THE FIRST ONLINE FIDE World Corporate Championship consisting of 284 teams, many of them famous companies, took place from the 19th to 21st February 2021. A fundraising initiative for FIDE, it attracted commercial names like: Sberbank, Grenke Bank, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Google, IBM etc., In the end Grenke Bank took the award.

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CURRENT TECH CHATTER is about Fat

Fritz 2. Fat Fritz is a commercial chess entity by ChessBase, which was first released in November 2019 featuring a set of custommade neural network weights that work in the open source project Leela Chess Zero within its Lc0 executable, while Fat Fritz 2.0 released in February 2021 is based on Stockfish 12 and custom NNUE technology. ChessBase, in an article entitled: ‘Fat Fritz 2, best of both worlds’ on the 11th February 2021 writes: ‘This is arguably the strongest entity that has ever played chess.’

However, Chess24 has countered with this comment: ‘Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero developers have joined together with Lichess to condemn what they see as false advertising by ChessBase of the recently released Fat Fritz 2 chess software. The Stockfish developers, meanwhile, point out that Fat Fritz 2, which is being sold for around 100 euros, is the free

Stockfish with a net that adds no noticeable increase in playing strength.’

GM Hikaru Nakamura has sent a tweeted invitation to all parties to ‘have a discussion in the next few days on my stream. If there’s more to this, let’s hear about it.’

Watch this space!

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IS IT TELLING that the only recent entry on the CHESSA website and Facebook page is about the movie called Critical Thinking, an American biographical drama film based on the true story of the Miami Jackson High School chess team, the first inner-city team to win the U.S. National Chess Championship? What is SA doing? That said, it is a heart-warming movie.

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MEANWHILE GM Ahmed Adly won the Open Section at the maiden edition of the Africa Online Individual Chess Championship 2021 organised by the FIDE and the African Chess Confederation. Amina Mezioud from Algeria became Women’s Champion, Charles de Villiers from South Africa won the Senior Tournament, Lamine Brahami from Algeria was first in the U20 Open and Lina Nassir from Algeria clinched the title in the U20 Girls section. The biggest surprise of the event was perhaps the fourth place of the untitled and lower-rated Linda Dalitso Shaba from Zimbabwe.