NICK BARNETT CHESS
AT LAST THE FIDE Candidates Tournament plans to resume on April 19, 2021, more than a year after being stopped in its tracks by COVID-19 after Round 7. As before, it will take place in Yekaterinburg, Russia. It will end on 28th April 2021
Here are the standings, ratings and points before the 8th Round
1 Vachier-Lagrave, Maxime (2767) 15.25; 2 Nepomniachtchi, Ian (2774) 14.25; 3 Caruana, Fabiano (2842) 12.25; 4-5 Giri, Anish (2763) 11.25; 4-5 Wang, Hao (2762) 11.25 6 Grischuk, Alexander (2777) 12.25 7 Ding, Liren (2805) 8.25; 8 Alekseenko, Kirill (2698)9.25
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THE JULIUS BAER Challengers Chess Tour was won by 15-year-old Indian prodigy Praggnanandhaa (Pragg for short) Rameshbabu who won the Polgar Challenge. He earned $3,000 and a place in the 5th leg of the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, where he may meet Magnus Carlsen.
Team Polgar clinched team victory with 96.5 points to Team Kramnik’s 88. But the concept of a winning female in the Queens Gambit was not realized, in that all the boys ended in the top half of the standings, all the girls in the bottom half, even though some of them, according to their ratings, should not be there.
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IF YOUNG PRAGG displayed a sweet and humble disposition then Hikaru Nakamura must stand at the opposite end of civility, getting into a drunken fistfight with Eric Hansen, a Canadian grandmaster who runs the educational Chessbrah Twitch channel. Hansen discussed the issue during a three-hour stream on April 7, saying that Nakamura had a long history of toxic and violent behavior in the competitive chess community. The footage was recently released in full on YouTube, and shows other prominent chess players at the party during the conflict. While the rivalry between Hansen and Nakamura has been public for a while now, news of the fight — not to mention footage — has cast the friction between them in a new light for fans. Wasn’t chess meant to be a civilized solution to conflict?
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IM WATU KOBESE has and is, doing sterling country duty. He is the author of Masidlale Uthimba (Let us play chess), the first Xhosa chess book, published in July 2015 and translated from a version he wrote in Zulu. He had to invent new Xhosa words in order to accomplish the task. He wants nothing for himself but to distribute the book to Xhosa speakers. He and needs a sponsor.
You can contact him at watu.kobese@gmail.com
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REMEMBER to check facebook.com/ SACHESSPLAYERS for tournaments in South Africa. You need to do it often because notice is usually quite short.
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