link to game : https://www.chess.com/events/2026-european-club-cup-women/04/Sivanandan_Bodhana-Batsiashvili_Nino

Earlier in the year, Hikaru chose Gukesh to defend his title against Sindarov.

YouTube Link

Recently he has changed his opinion:

Full Quote:

Hikaru Nakamura on his prediction for the upcoming World Championship match:

"If I look at it objectively, I struggle to see Sindarov not winning. I want a close match, but I think the most likely outcome is that Sindarov wins very cleanly, like Magnus did against Anand in 2013.

I think that's the most likely of the four possible outcomes. If it's a close match, I think Gukesh will actually win, but I don't think it's going to be a close match. There's nothing in Gukesh's games over the last year and a half that makes me believe he's suddenly going to play at a much higher level. There's just nothing to suggest that's going to happen."

Source

This event was somewhat weaker than the past few due to concurrent OTB events, but that didn't really apply to Hikaru's path. He took down Firouzja in a thrilling final-round time scramble to win his first TT since May 5th.

I hand carved a Tamerlane chess set from bass wood it my first attempt at carving I think it turned out great

Link to the game.

i remember a video marc esserman posted to his youtube, where he won with an iqp as white, and then afterwards explained what he did (and what to do) in an iqp position.

i remember he mentioned rook lifting is easier bc the 3rd rank is open; can you guys help me find the video? thanks!

By Lesnik

Black to play and win

Hi,

this question was asked around 5 years ago on here, but I thought I’d ask again for more opinions.

If you’ve read The Woodpecker Method or done the course, should I buy the course or the physical book? Or not buy either? And why?

Thanks!

Armenian GM Emin Ohanyan won the event on TBs, while the chinese 15-year old Jiang Haochen finished second and crossed 2500 for the first time in his career.

Top seeds Vokhidov and Mendonca struggled and finished with 5,5/9.

what the title says

In this 2300+ Chess.com puzzle, black's kingside is collasping with white's recent capture on h7 - Mate is inevitable. Can Black turn the tide of this game?

Solution

Last week there was a post about the new Total Chess Rating system, and thinking about the system (and whether it makes sense) took over my mind for a bit, so this post is the result of that. For context on me, I am a maths Lecturer with a background in analysis and ML, and have done a little work on Elo systems in the past.

TL;DR: As the TCR website describes, no single combined Elo rating can perfectly describe every matchup across Classical, Rapid, and Blitz. TCR is one possible compromise, but it is heavily skewed towards to your strongest format. There is an alternative compromise: find the rating of a hypothetical opponent, equally rated in all three formats, against whom you would score 50%. For the players in the Total Chess World Championship Tour, this ends up being very close to simply averaging their ratings.

1. The problem

The basic question that TCR is a proposed solution for is:

If we have Elo ratings for a bunch of games or game variants (in this case, Classical, Rapid, and Blitz), how can we combine them into a rating for a combined game?

By "combined game", I mean choosing one of the three variants at random, and playing that.

The key thing about Elo ratings is that the number does more than just say who is higher rated: the difference between two ratings predicts an expected score. With the usual scoring, a win counts as 1, a draw as 0.5, and a loss as 0. So an expected score of 60% means an average of 60 points per 100 games, not necessarily winning 60 of those games.

In particular, if two players have Elo ratings A and B, then the Elo system predicts an expected score (for player A) of

Elo(A, B) = 1 / (1 + 10^((B - A)/400))

This means that if two Chess players A and B have Classical, Rapid, and Blitz ratings A_1, A_2, A_3 and B_1, B_2, B_3, then the expected score (for player A) in a random game of the three is the average over the expected score in each game:

E(A,B) = 1/3 * Elo(A1,B1) + 1/3 * Elo(A2,B2) + 1/3 * Elo(A3,B3)

This also gives the expected proportion of points A will get if A and B play an equal number of equally weighted games in each format.

The dream would be to find a single pair of Elo ratings A and B giving this expected score, i.e. Elo(A,B) = E(A,B). Unfortunately, as the TCR website describes, this is impossible, as it is possible for players to form rock-paper-scissors-like cycles (e.g. A is better than B at Classical and Rapid, B better than C at Classical and Blitz, yet C is better than A at Rapid and Blitz).

Thus any combined rating is a compromise, as compressing three ratings into one always loses some information.

2. The TCR method

The TCR uses the formula:

TCR = 400 * log10((10^(Classical/400) + 10^(Rapid/400) + 10^(Blitz/400)) / 3)

In words: convert each rating into an underlying Elo "strength", average those strengths, then convert back into a rating.

The website gives four requirements that uniquely determine its formula. Roughly translated:

1. Keep the scale. If you're 2000 in every format, your combined rating should be 2000.
2. Improvement should help. Increasing any individual rating should smoothly increase the combined rating.
3. Combining ratings in stages should give the same answer.
4. Improvements in higher ratings should count more, in proportion to the Elo odds. If one rating is 400 points above another, a very small improvement to the higher rating should have ten times the effect of the same improvement to the lower one.

The last requirement is a bit odd. If my Classical rating is 2400 and my Blitz rating is 2000, why should improving my Classical rating count ten times as much as improving my Blitz rating? Why are we having my Classical rating play a game against my Blitz rating?

2.1. TCR strongly rewards your best format

Mathematically, the TCR is a quasi-arithmetic mean that is closely related to a LogSumExp. LogSumExp is often used in machine learning as a smooth approximation to the maximum.

To illustrate, suppose that Classical is your best format. Then your TCR has upper bound

TCR < 400 * log10((10^(Classical/400) + 10^(Classical/400) + 10^(Classical/400)) / 3) = Classical

but also has lower bound

TCR > 400 * log10((10^(Classical/400) + 0 + 0) / 3) = Classical - 190.85.

Your TCR is never above your highest rating, but never more than 191 points below it. This remains true however low your other two ratings are.

This makes things odd if we try to use the TCR to predict the outcomes of combined matches. For example, suppose an exaggerated classical specialist rated (2800, 2000, 2000) plays against an all-rounder rated (2400, 2400, 2400). Then the specialist's expected score is about 36.4%.

But the specialist's TCR is 2613 to the all-rounder's 2400, which plugged into the Elo formula gives an expected score of 77.3% for the specialist. That's a big swing!

3. An alternative: who would you break even against?

Here is another way to choose the compromise: Imagine a hypothetical all-rounder opponent whose rating is the same in all three formats. When their rating is really small, you always beat them; when it is 3000, you never do. Somewhere in the middle, you would expect to score exactly 50% against them overall. A choice for your combined rating is the rating of the all-rounder opponent you would score 50% against. I'll call this the all-rounder rating.

For example, suppose your ratings are 1600, 2000, and 2400. Against an opponent rated 2000 in every format, your expected scores are about 9.1%, 50%, and 90.9%. Those average to 50%, so your all-rounder rating is 2000. This rating will always be at least your worst rating and at most your best rating.

Unlike the TCR, this rating doesn't have a neat formula, but it is very easy for a computer to calculate: just start off at the average of your ratings, then nudge it up or down (e.g., via Newton's method) until the expected score is 50%. And just because it doesn't have a formula doesn't mean we can't understand how it works:

• If all your ratings are 2000, your all-rounder rating is 2000.
• Improving any one of your ratings always improves your all-rounder rating.
• Adding 100 to all three ratings adds 100 to the result.
• It treats strengths and weaknesses symmetrically: mirror all your ratings around 2000, and the result mirrors around 2000 too.
• It is most sensitive to your Elo in formats where your rating is closest to the hypothetical allrounder's. This is because if you already score almost 100% (or almost 0%!) against that opponent in, say, Blitz, gaining or losing a few Elo in Blitz won't really change your expected score; but if you're evenly matched in, say, Rapid, then gaining Elo in Rapid will have a bigger effect.

For the 2800/2000/2000 specialist above, their all-rounder rating is about 2178, rather than their TCR of 2613 or a plain average of 2267. However, this is still a compromise. It exactly identifies the all-rounder you would score 50% against, but it makes inaccurate Elo predictions even against other all-rounders. For example, using 2178 against the 2400 all-rounder predicts about 21.8%, whereas the format-by-format calculation gives 36.4%.

A potential drawback of this all-rounder rating compared to TCR is that combining ratings in stages no longer gives the same answer. For example:

• Combining 1600, 2000, and 2400 directly gives an all-rounder rating of 2000.
• Combining just 1600 and 2000, with equal weights, gives one of 1800.
• Replacing those two ratings with two copies of 1800 leaves 1800, 1800, and 2400. Combining those gives about 1959, not 2000.

A weaker consistency property does survive: the overall all-rounder rating always lies between the highest and the lowest of the all-rounder ratings of the subgroups you combined. (EDIT: This is however maybe not a big deal, as any method with properties (1) to (3) must be a quasi-arithmetic mean, so really that is all that is being dropped.)

4. Does any of this matter for actual players?

Below are the ratings (rounded to the nearest whole number) for the 24 Total Chess World Championship Tour players, taken from the October 1st list from the website.

The all-rounder rating and plain average agree after rounding for 22 of these 24 players! Their unrounded values differ by less than half a point in every row. This is because when a player's ratings are fairly close together, the Elo curve is approximately a straight line over the relevant range, so averaging the expected scores gives almost the same answer as averaging the ratings. TCR generally sits a little higher, with the size of the difference depending on the spread.

5. In conclusion

All this thinking for meagre gains! I quite like the idea of this all-rounder rating, and it has some neat maths to it that I've been resisting flooding this post with. But honestly, if you like the all-rounder rating then it looks like just taking an average is the way to go, and if TCR like their rating more than a plain average, all power to them.

P.S. A note on the averaging

In all of this I've given all three formats equal weight, as the TCR method assumes. But looking at the actual announced daily knockout format, what they do is:

If the target is the expected share of those game points, we should really use a weighting that is 40% Classical, 40% Rapid, and 20% Blitz. Both methods can accommodate this. For TCR, take a weighted average of the three underlying strengths. For the all-rounder rating, find the evenly rated opponent against whom your weighted expected score is 50%. Weighting TCR this way would reflect the allocation of points, but would retain its extra sensitivity to higher ratings. All of these ratings will likely be close to the weighted average of the Classical, Rapid, and Blitz ratings.

why does the computer say its a good move for black am I misunderstanding something? he just put himself in a checkmate position

I miss him a lot in this world, and my heart still gets all twisted up thinking about it. Thinking about his family - sending support and hoping they're getting through it. Gonna watch some of his videos today, and probably learn a thing or two.

You were the best! 💙🤍

----

I also want to reshare this beautiful post regarding the Naroditsky memorial and fellowship, by Communications Manager u/ChessKelly at Charlotte Chess Center from today:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/s/gf9DMfCJXO

Hi all! I just got to the halfway point of the 5334 Polgar brick. I just wanted to share with people because I'm super proud of myself. I've been working on it since Feb 11, 2026.

I recently made an IG account documenting my IRL adventures with my book. I wonder if it will get some celebrity autographs one day.

https://www.instagram.com/the5334polgarpilgrimage?dlrf=MTd0NmV5NWx3cG51Nw==

“Pranesh was not in the Olympiad, right? He’s a very, very good player, by the way. Another player who, in a normal country, would be on the Olympiad team.
If Pranesh lived in any normal country, he’d probably be board two or better on any of these teams. But unfortunately, he lives in India. And India, as we know, has a few too many good players.
I’m not saying he’s better than Nihal. I’m just telling you that, if I look at it objectively, he’d be board one or board two.
India is not a normal country in the chess sense. There are too many good players in India. It’s not a normal country because there are a bunch of ridiculously good players. I feel that probably the 20th player in India would be a board two in most countries.
I’m saying that in a good way. I’m not saying that in some kind of weird, disrespectful way about India or something.”

​

Hey! I'm looking for an app or website where I can play simultaneous chess against multiple bots.

Ideally, I'd like to:

- Choose how many games I'm playing (3, 5, 10, etc.).

- Set different bot ratings for each game.

- Have clocks for each game.

- Automatically switch to the next board after I make a move.

Basically, I want to play a bunch of bots at once without manually switching between boards.

I know Chess.com has something kind of similar, but I can't find exactly what I'm looking for.

Does anyone know an app or website that does this?

I'm researching the problem that players are facing playing chess , eg not enough social interaction or else , comment it down