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Editors note: with this publication of GM Jesse Kraais cover story for the June issue of Chess Life here at CLO, we are breaking the third wall between print and digital media for the first time. Kraais thoughtful consideration of what it means to play chess in the time of COVID-19, and what it might mean for the future of chess, deserves to be shared with as wide an audience as possible. We are proud to bring it to the world as an example of the fine writing one will find in Chess Life.

June 2020 Chess Life Cover

Chess and Coronavirus art

If you are not currently a US Chess member, please consider becoming one (or renewing your membership!) to support all of our publications and the mission of US Chess: to empower people, enrich lives, and enhance communities through chess. ~JH

For those who would prefer to listen to GM Kraais audiobook version of this article, we have made it available at our YouTube channel:

You can also check out the June episode of Cover Stories with Chess Life, where Chess Life editor John Hartmann interviews Kraai about his article, his life in chess, and his thoughts on the future.

My chess world got canceled in one afternoon. My trip to the Saint Louis Chess Club to be their resident grandmaster was canceled. The Denver Open was canceled. My kids daycare was canceled. And several promising students canceled, saying they could no longer afford lessons.

For several months I had been trying to make a comeback. I wasnt going to ever be world champion or anything, but if I could get my rating back over 2500, maybe the Saint Louis Chess Club would invite me to play in one of their events. And maybe in a couple years I could qualify for the U.S. Senior Championship and even dream of playing for the U.S. senior team. With one round a day and a social distance of at least four feet from the next board, the calm dignity of tournaments like those is the closest Ive come to being part of a spiritual gathering. But to get back to that promised land Id need the 2500. And getting back to 2500 would mean playing in weekend Swiss tournaments until I had planted my flag on the corpses of 60 ten-year-olds with a Puzzle Rush score over 40.

Its hard to imagine the usual American weekend Swiss not getting canceled, at least as we knew it. The transmission of bacteria and viruses begins with a cordial handshake before the first round on Friday night. Then they start breeding. Our lack of sleep and the anxiety of battle helps them crawl into us. Every male chess player has smelled the microbial world when they run from their board for a nervous pee and open the moist bathroom door. By the Sunday rounds the potty is a sulfurous purgatory. Every male chess player has seen the scraps of toilet paper stomped into a floating debris, the shoeprints on the toilet bowl, the brown paper towels flowing out from the bin onto the floor like lava.

So yes, dear friends, our tournaments have been a dance hall for all the little things that feed on our skin, gut, and lungs. We obviously share more than just the game. But lets move on.

Imagine a darkly lit cavernous room with older Italian gentlemen pouring you wine so smooth it wears a sweater. Earlier that evening I stepped off the plane to get a text from Joy Bray, the general manager of the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis: Would you like to have dinner with Kasparov? Boy howdy, yes I would. Great, pick you up in one hour.

There were about eight of us around a large circular table and at some point Joy asked us what we thought of the newer and faster time controls. Well, listen to my rant: I am opposed. The beauty of chess is found in the depth of its moves and strategic conceptions. Chess fans want to sense the sublime when they experience a game. And the reason the World Championship is so popular beyond the chess world is because its a proxy for the questions, Whos the smartest? and What does smart look like? If we make the game any faster we will cheapen it into a video game. We will make chess an esport.

Many answers were given on both sides of the argument. Kasparov spoke last. He said something like, Look, everyone is making emotional arguments based on their personal connection to the game. But the trend is obvious. Chess is getting faster.

You might know my worthy foe as the brother of Jen Shahade or simply The Lesser Shahade. But behind the scenes, IM Greg Shahade has guided at least two commendable projects. He founded the U.S. Chess School, which has been elevating the game of our most talented youth for years. And he started the U.S. Chess League, the first online team event, which has since evolved into the PRO Chess League.

My dispute with Greg started long before I realized I was on the wrong side of Kasparovs trend. Greg wants chess to be faster. He wants blunders and commentators screaming stuff like, Man down, MAN DOWN, better get the medics out here quick! and, Oh no, OH NO, dude is gonna fly off the top rope! This ones gonna hurt.

Now, please note, when Greg and I argue with each other we couch our arguments in the context of how we can make chess more popular. As if we were in an existential battle, we find ourselves saying things like, If we dont get faster, we will die. But look, we are both fooling ourselves: when Greg and I argue, I think we are actually sublimating our most intimate moments in chess. Greg came up playing blitz, a jocular blitz in parks and online. Thats how he got good, and thats what hes good at.

He is my enemy. My chess study involves taking a scoresheet of a long game Ive played against someone strong and analyzing that thing for days in a handwritten notebook with a nice wooden set. I enjoy thinking about how a shift in pawn structure shifts the careers of each piece, some becoming unemployed, others finding themselves suddenly the head of a promising new startup. I enjoy solving studies that take hours to solve. Greg is working tirelessly to undermine the spiritual wonder and solitude of that work.

That is the title of a weighty tome by the Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman. You can read a more accessible take by Michael Lewis, the guy who wrote The Big Short, called The Undoing Project. But let me give you my laymans understanding of Kahnemans thinking and how it relates to chess:

Your body has two kinds of muscles, slow twitch and fast twitch. You need the slow ones to do construction work all day and to run a marathon. You need the fast ones to do a bench press and run a sprint. Chess isnt any different. Youve got the instant and intuitive reactions of a blitz game and the deep thinking of a five-hour game. And Kahneman wants to say that they are two different games.

A blitz player like Greg often experiences moments where he feels like he is in a groove and is somehow making all the right movesas if he understands what is going on in the position. That optimistic euphoria is the hallmark of thinking fast and we have all felt it, both in chess and our daily lives. We need that false overconfidence to overcome the massive uncertainty inherent in all the little decisions that we have to make every day. Simply put, our species could not exist without fooling ourselves into thinking that we knew what was going on.

Kahnemans articulation of what fast thinking is opened my eyes to what Id sensed in blitz for decades: in a blitz game you are not seeing the situation as anything new or unique, you are using a rough and tumble summation of all your past experiences to quickly make a decision. So the moves you play in a blitz game are actually the moves youve played before. When you are playing fast you are only looking for the things you already know. And yet every player who has spent some time analyzing a position knows that there are an entire host of unknown factors and variations that they dont yet know and dont even have a vocabulary for. Thats what thinking slow is for.

But thinking slow is harder, much harder. A recent study found that guys like GM Fabiano Caruana burn up to 6,000 calories a day sitting at the board, three times more than your average person. And I can report to my shame that even though I preach a lot about how you should study your own games in a notebook, there have been numerous times in which I have not found the spiritual energy to do it. Just starting the process is the hardest part. And I can report that very few of my students have been able to study their own games in depth as part of their chess habits. When chess players self-report that they are lazy, what they are actually saying is that thinking long is hard.

Getting punched by coronavirus forced me to think fast. Its been hard to hold a thought. Instead Im constantly updating my browser to see the latest epidemic numbers. Twitter tells me things all the time. And I see it in my students too; like me, the chess they do can only be fast, stuff like Puzzle Rush and blitz. Its a pastime, a way to not face whats going on. We are all getting a taste of Gregs world of distraction.

Now here is an experiment I know many of you have already tried. Set up an online game on your favorite chess server using a classical time control, say game in 90 with a 30 second increment. Use your nice wooden pieces if you want. Can you think in the same way as your non-online self? I cant. My mind wanders. And I have to check Twitter and the news if my opponent really starts thinking. My students report the same experience.

So lets say something simple and obvious: the trend toward faster chess, which existed long before coronavirus, will be magnified by the move to online chess that the virus has forced upon us. And that means I have to admit I am losing to Greg. COVID-19 has greatly aided my enemy; Ive gone from clearly worse to losing. Because online chess is fast chess.

Now a thought experiment. Chess players are very proud of their ratings. Ask yourself: Which is the real rating: the online rating or the over-the-board rating? A month ago, most of us would have said that only the over-the-board rating counted. And that online ratings were like a shadow of the over-the-board proving ground. But without an active currency others will emerge. And I have to report that even before COVID-19 several strong players, as high as what Id consider 1900, approached me for lessons and it became clear that theyd never even played an over-the-board game! These are players with a tactical awareness, a well-oiled opening repertoire, and even a rudimentary endgame understanding.

So here is a simple prediction: the longer COVID-19 lasts the more online chess will come to be seen as the real chess.

Online chess has historically not been taken seriously because of cheating. Its a stigma. But cheating online isnt as easy as it used to be. Not too long ago, cheating claims would be mediated by a weak grandmaster like myself who would somehow try to divine if something looked suspicious. But now the big sites like chess.com are developing sophisticated algorithms to catch the cheaters. And what the cheaters soon realize is that the danger is not having some chump like me look at just one of their games. They have to fear that the algorithms are going to comb through all of their moves.

Last year I had a chance to talk about the situation with chess.coms main man, IM Danny Rensch. And he told me about their small anti-cheating army. The scale of smart minds and resources dedicated to fighting the problem astonished me. It was like being invited to the other side of the matrix. And Danny told me there was a lista list of all the cheaters they had caught. He said it was long. Id have to sign a non-disclosure agreement to see it.

I can tell you this about cheaters, both online and over the board: like the carriers of the coronavirus they are all around you, they seem honest and normal, and a surprising number of them are your friends. I knew the most famous cheater of all. He was a gentle soul who lived for chess. We played on the same Bundesliga team in the last millennium. It was that same gentle dude, GM Igors Rausis, who systematically visited his phonetaped to the toilet roll case in the bathroom stallduring his games critical moments. And he did it for years. Knowing Igors made me decide against seeing Dannys list. I didnt want to know.

This is how I think its going to play out: Danny and chess.com have played nice guy so far. They dont accuse the cheaters openly, because lawsuits have no upside for chess.com or similar sites. But the more online chess becomes real chess, the more severe the punishment against cheating will become, and Dannys anti-cheating squad is only growing in sophistication.

Before we move on to the future I want to talk a little about the past. The history of thought is usually presented as a history of thinkers. But for the sake of our current situation in chess, lets mention that there is a different and powerful way of reflecting on what thinking is and how it develops. Instead of saying that Luther brought about the Reformation you can instead say that the printing press caused it. Or, to put it all in a general formula: that the small and large revolutions in how we think, do business, and even worship all come from how our information is processed and distributed.

In this view, my intimate relationship with chessas something you do with a notebook and talk about with symbols like , , and is an outdated and dying art, even if it is still my place of worship. Greg, on the other hand, is a little younger than I and has his own set of symbols, tools, and formative experiences. But the very young players dont even know about chess books. More than one of them has told me that books simply are not user-friendly.

COVID-19 has accelerated the transition of our game to an online experience. Chess.com reports a 40-100% jump in the metrics of traffic, social interaction, and games played since the crisis began. And they just had nine million games played in one day. Chess will become a new thing online. And the young, who have grown up entirely online, will shape it most.

First we will have a period of mourning. Old codgers like me will wail their lamentations from the sidelines, moaning about their long thoughts, their mildewy chess notebooks, and their loss of a handshake. But Im just some guy whos good at complaining. Consider Fabis plight: that kid hasnt gone a month without a classical tournament in over 20 years. His whole life has been constructed around the struggle. And he will now certainly go through a period of what medical people call withdrawal.

The moaning cant last forever. And I already know that I cant stop playing. Im old enough to have tried several times before. The quitting never sticks. From that personal experience I know there are millions of other players across the world who will grasp at new ways of playing the game. And online will be the only place for chess for at least a while.

International Master David Pruess told me that we are all just going to throw stuff at the wall until it sticks. And loads of sites around the world are doing just that. David and IM Kostya Kavutskiy got me involved with a site called ChessDojo and I think we are just as confused as everyone else. Take our name as an obvious example. What is it that we are training for? It sounds like we are still talking about handshakes and scoresheets. But the reality is that we are in Gregs world now.

The first week of Dojo was all about clutching onto the past with the weapons of the young: we did Twitch streams and YouTube videos about the 2020 Candidates tournament. And that was lovely. It doesnt get much better than thinking along with the top players in the world in real time while jacked up on morning caffeine. But then that light went, and its not clear when or how the Candidates tournament can be rebooted.

We just played a Vote Chess game against a group of players called ChesspatzerUK. Yes, it was hard to calculate and think deeply while being onlineand that is our official excuse for losing the game to a proud group of patzers. But Vote Chess was also new and fun. Hearing other peoples thoughts as you play is certainly part of the new chess experience. And of course, you cant complain too much about a world where you can watch and even interact with some of the worlds strongest players as they play and stream over Twitch.

Dojo will soon have team events against other sites. And we will train for those events over Twitch and our Discord server. How we train and what kind of event we are training for is obviously totally unclear, something we will have to figure out as we go along. Maybe we can follow the lead of San Franciscos Mechanics Institute and the Charlotte Chess Center & Scholastic Academy, who are hosting training camps online. It seems strange when you look at it from where chess used to be, when teams were all bound to some physical location. Now it starts to feel natural that a team can come from all over the world, that your sense of belonging can come from interactions with people youve never met in real life.

For my part I will continue my long struggle with Greg. I will hack out some small corner of the world where he cant find me, and where chess can still be played long.

Read the rest here:
Chess and Coronavirus - uschess.org

For Tournament Directors running events on Chess.com, SwissSys has been kind enough to add a new feature, from version 10.1 on, that will hopefully make the process of submitting US Chess rated events much simpler. Even better, its currently free to use for this purpose!

Once you have completed an event on Chess.com, you can download the crosstable and then open that file in SwissSys, which will open it up as a crosstable with all the players and results filled in. Then, using this new feature, SwissSys can import the US Chess ID numbers for any players that have registered with Chess.com as a US Chess member and linked their ID number to their Chess.com account. Once you have the US Chess IDs for all the players in your event you can then use SwissSys to create the US Chess rating files needed to upload into the TD/Affiliate area.

Here is a video showing you how to get the crosstable from Chess.com and the new feature in SwissSys.

Here are some important links for reference:

SwissSysChess.com US Chess Member Registration FormTD/Affiliate Support Area

We hope you enjoy this new feature and it makes rating Chess.com events with US Chess much simpler. Our thanks go out to both SwissSys and Chess.com for their efforts in assisting US Chess Tournament Directors!

See the original post here:
SwissSys Feature for Helping with Chess.com US Chess Rated Events - uschess.org

Five-time world chess champion Viswanathan Anand returned to the city on Saturday evening after spending a week in quarantine at a hotel in Bengaluru.

Anand, who was in Germany for more than 100 days, can relax now that he is back home, but cant venture out of his room the health authorities guidelines prescribe another seven days of home quarantine.

Yes. Anand is fine. We are happy and relieved that he is here, Aruna Anand, the chess genius wife, told The Hindu.

Now this is the last part of the quarantine at home, we need to follow all the instructions by the health authorities. We are doing it in the strictest possible manner for everybodys safety.

Aruna said Anand had locked himself in his room.

In fact, when the car came, we stood at the gate of the building and he waved at us. We watched him go inside his room and shut himself.

We have aged people (Anands father and my mother at home) and my nine-year-old son Akhil. It is important that he stays separate so that nobodys health is compromised, she said.

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Chess | Viswanathan Anand returns home - The Hindu

6/4/2020 In the early 1990s, International Master Stuart Rachels was one of the very best US chess players. He played games against Garry Kasparov, Viswanathan Anand, Nigel Short, Anthony Miles and Boris Spassky, only to name a few. His chess adventures are funny, beautiful, interesting and honest. His book "The Best I Saw In Chess" which just came out, is a blast to read. We conducted an interview with Rachels about the book, the chess greats he met, his decision to quit chess and the ego of chess players. | Photos: Stuart Rachels

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Before Stuart Rachels and I started the interview, he showed me some of his chess treasures. They were an original Life magazinefeaturing Bobby Fischer on the cover, a chess trophy he won in 1979, some Estonian coins with a picture of Paul Kereson them, and a box of chocolates which was handed to him by Garry Kasparov's mother in 1983. Just as Rachels said it in his book, the box is empty but the wrapper of the Russian chocolates is stillin great shape.

Stuart Rachels grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and played over 1000 rated chess games from the age of 9 to 23. His rating surpassed the 2600 mark (USCF) when he was 20, and he became the youngest Master in American history when he was eleven. Rachels never played chessprofessionally though. A quote from his book explains this decision very well:

The exhilaration of competition and the joy of mental absorption - that's why I played chess. I loved it.

Arne Kaehler: Dear Stuart, thank you for having this interview with me. Would you kindly give a short introduction about who you are?

Stuart Rachels: With pleasure, thanks for having me. I prefer to think of myself as nine or eleven, but I recently turned fifty. I love chess and played it for several years until I went to graduateschool in Philosophy. Since then, I've been a philosophy professor in Alabama. After tenure, you have job security, and you are able todo what youwant to do, so I started to write this book. I have really been pushing on it for a while.

AK: What life occurrence led youto write it?

SR: I have to admit it happened quite accidentally. First I was just interested to look at my old scoresheets and gathered all of them out fromshoeboxes in the closet. Then I just wrote up a few things to maybe put them on a website one day. But I kept going and going, until I found myself writing a book.

AK: Your book is full of interesting games paired with a lot of stories and anecdotes around them. Were there any games and stories that didn't make it into the final version?

SR: The book is 400 pages long but originally I wrote more than 550 pages. I think it is good to write too much and then omit some of it, rather than using anything which comes to mind. I moved the chapters around, and used some of them for the appendix, quotes or anecdotes instead. My best stories are in the book, no doubt.

AK: One of my favourite chapters from your book is "Impressionof the Greats" (Chapter 12) where you talk about your relations, meetings and experiences with Garry Kasparov, Yasser Seirawan, Nigel Short, just to name a few. Which is your personally favourite anecdote?

SR: I think it was the time when Garry Kasparov played a joke on me. In London in December of 1983, Garry was winning his semi-final candidates match against Viktor Kortchnoi. A mutual friendsent me up to Kasparov's room to fetch a package. I was fourteen years old at that time. Kasparov gave me the package and, due to the excitement, I ran back to my friend's room as fast as I could, jumping down two to three stairs at a time and dashing through the corridors. Arriving in the room, to my surprise, Kasparov was already sitting there, being quite pleased with playing this magic trick on me. Of course, he evidently knew some secret shortcut to theroom.

AK: Did you ever regret your decision to stop playing chess?

SR: I never regretted the decision because I played blitz against Viswanathan Anand. Once you have done thatyou realize that you will never become World Champion.

Master Class Vol. 12: Viswanathan Anand

This DVD allows you to learn from the example of one of the best players in the history of chess and from the explanations of the authors how to successfully organise your games strategically, consequently how to keep your opponent permanently under press

AK: Are there any chess related plans in the future?

SR: I cannot help myself and have started to write again. The next book isabout fortresses which I find fascinating. To my knowledge, there has never been a chess book devoted exclusively to fortresses. However, that book wont be comparable to this book, because it wont be as long and wont be nearly as personal.

AK: In your book, you mentioned the ego of chess players a couple of times. What is your personal opinion about how muchego affects chess and chess players?

An outstanding talent: Stuart Rachels (center)

SR: It is a complicated relationship. Someone once observed that if you look at the players in the US Championship conducting post-mortems, they are all very objective about their playedgames. Weaker players will try to justify their moves, but for a strong player, objectivity may be a pre-requisite. However, I knew three people very well who became World Junior Champions, all of them phenomenally talented players - Yasser Seirawan, Max Dlugy and Ilya Gurevich. Theyhad a certain confidence, even arrogance, deeply rooted into them, which helped them in stressful situations and important games. These are tough guys psychologically. Magnus Carlsen seems to be a very laid back and nice fellow, but I believe he must also have this psychological toughness and confidencewhich you cannotsee from the outside. Perhaps great players have to have this.

AK: Thank you very much for taking your time for this interview Stuart.

SR: Absolutely and anytime again.

At the U.S. Championship in 1989, Stuart Rachels seemed bound for the cellar. Ranked last and holding no IM norms, the 20-year-old amateur from Alabama was expected to get waxed by the American top GMs of the day that included Seirawan, Gulko, Dzindzichashvili, deFirmian, Benjamin and Browne.

Instead, Rachels pulled off a gigantic upset and became the youngest U.S. Champion since Bobby Fischer. Three years later he retired from competitive chess, but he never stopped following the game.

In this wide-ranging, elegantly written, and highly personal memoir, Stuart Rachels passes on his knowledge of chess. Included are his duels against legends such as Kasparov, Anand, Spassky, Ivanchuk, Gelfand and Miles, but the heart of the book is the explanation of chess ideas interwoven with his captivating stories.

There are chapters on tactics, endings, blunders, middlegames, cheating incidents, and even on how to combat that rotten opening, the Rti. Rachels offers a complete and entertaining course in chess strategy. At the back are listed 110 principles of playbits of wisdom that arise naturally in the books 24 chapters.

Every chess player will find it difficult to put his sparkling book down. As a bonus, it will make you a better player.

Stuart Rachels(b. 1969) is an International Master who retired from chess when he was 23. He works as anAssociate Professor in the Philosophy Department at theUniversity of Alabama and has edited new editions of books by his father, the famous philosopher James Rachels.

Arne Kaehler: This book was a real joy to read. It is fresh, entertaining, and hasfunny stories and anecdotes about Kasparov, Kortschnoi, Anand, Seirawan and many others. But it also offers a lot of serious, deepchess analysis, and it is a pleasure to look at plenty of interesting games.

Visit link:
The best I saw in chess - by Stuart Rachels - Chessbase News

By: Sports Desk | Updated: May 31, 2020 10:42:25 am John Torturro in The Luzhin Defence; a still from Shatranj ke Khiladi (Screenshots)

In the unprecedented change the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to the sports landscape around the world, with travel bans forcing most global sports to postpone their events,chess is one sport which has managed to be insulated, even managing to regain some of its popularity.

There has been large-scale participation in chess, both competitively and recreationally, from people via computers during the lockdown.The essence of the mind sport has been beautifully presented on screen for those unfamiliar with the sport to get a glimpse of how interesting and exciting it can be similar to how many great films have depicted the game and even centred their films on the game over the years.

Here is a look at a few great films portraying chess:

Queen of Katwe (2016)

The 2016 film by Mira Nair is an on-screen depiction of the life of Phiona Mutesi, a girl from Katwe, a slum in Kampala, Uganda, and her journey towards becoming a Woman Candidate Master.

Produced by Walt Disney Pictures and starring Madina Nalwanga and Lupita Nyongo, the film is unique for being a chess movie based on the life of an African woman, when most of the chess movies depict the stories of white men.

Despite having a limited release, the direction and messaging of the movie received a lot of praises, and the movie went on to win a lot of awards at various award functions.

Pawn Sacrifice (2014)

The 2014 Edward Zwick directorial is a biographical drama on the rise of Bobby Fischer from a young chess enthusiast in New York to winning the World Chess Championship in 1972.

READ | Five of the greatest chess matches ever played

The film stars Tobey Maguire as Fischer and Liev Schreiber as Russian grandmaster and Fischers rival, Boris Spassky. The film was well received by both critics and audiences alike, and was particularly praised for its portrayal of Fischers mental health, his paranoia and the dark side of an unhealthy obsession with chess.

The performances of the main cast were highly appreciated and the film has developed a cult following in the years that followed.

The Dark Horse (2014)

Based on the real-life story of Genesis Potini, a New Zealand chess player who suffered from bipolar disorder, the movie depicts how Potini trains disadvantaged children to instill in them the discipline and skill necessary to succeed in chess.

With chess being used metaphorically to develop skills necessary to succeed in life, the Cliff Curtis-starrer was widely appreciated, sweeping awards across New Zealand and even being labelled by some Kiwi journalists as one of the greatest films to come out of New Zealand.

The inspirational film has developed its own niche fan base since then, and is a huge fan favourite among chess enthusiasts.

The Luzhin Defence (2000)

Based on Vladimir Nabokovs book The Defence, the Marleen Gorris directorial chronicles the journey of a mentally tormented young chess grandmaster and the woman he meets while competing at a chess tournament in Italy.

Starring John Turturro and Emily Watson, the romantic drama is particularly famous for the final chess match between Turati and Luzhin. The usage of chess in other plot points throughout the movie, and the detailed focus on the protagonists mental breakdown as the movie progresses, have contributed to the movie being viewed as a classic in todays time.

READ | When the wait finally ended for Viswanathan Anand

The climax of the movie, though dissimilar to the book, is considered to be one of the best in any chess-based movie.

Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)

Contrary to what the title suggests, the movie isnt about grandmaster Bobby Fischer at all, rather the plot focuses on young chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin and how his coach and family attempt to nurture his natural talent for chess.The title of the film is a reference to Waitzkins quest to develop his abilities to the level of Fischers as he progresses in the world of chess.

Starring Max Pomeranc in the lead role, and having exceptional performances from Ben Kingsley and Laurence Fishburne, the film has been adored by chess fans all around the world.

The film was even nominated for best cinematography at the 66th Academy Awards, and is often rated as one of the most well-made chessmovies ever.

Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977)

The 1977 film, based on Premchands short story of the same name, was legendary director Satyajit Rays first Hindi directorial. Starring Amjad Khan and Richard Attenborough, along with Amitabh Bachchan as the narrator, the film was widely appreciated all around the world, even being Indias entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 51st Academy Awards.

Literally meaning The Chess Players, the film, set in 1856, chronicles the life of two men devoted to the game of chess against the backdrop of the British East India Companys schemes and ploys. With Rays signature style, the film is considered to be one of his best works and one of Indias best chess-based movies.

Magnus, a 2016 documentary on the life of Magnus Carlsen, 2012s Brooklyn Castle and Liz Garbuss Bobby Fischer Against the World are a few other films made on chess deserving mention.

Written by Shubhang Gopal

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Six greatest chess movies ever made - The Indian Express