Skilling Open 3: 17-year-old Alireza Firouzja stunning three wins in a row

Magnus Carlsen came within an inch of beating Sergey Karjakin in what our commentator Peter Svidler described as “an epic game”. What developed into a 7-hour thriller started with a Berlin Defence where it seemed the only talking point would be a puzzling rook shuffle in the opening. A couple of inaccuracies, though, and Magnus was scenting blood. You had the feeling almost anyone else in world chess would have gone down without a fight, but Karjakin clung on for dear life and got the draw his bravery deserved – even if he needed some help from his opponent!

This was the day the 2016 World Chess Championship match began in earnest, with both players coming close enough to taste victory and defeat. It left them visibly shell-shocked, with neither certain if Magnus had ever had a clear win within his grasp (our silicon friends answer in the affirmative).

It was a remarkable journey from a game which started with a 5.Re1 Berlin that failed to set the pulses racing. Eyebrows were at least raised by Carlsen’s retreat 10.Re2:

The move, of course, looks a little ridiculous, but it turned out what was much stranger was that Sergey and his team had apparently overlooked a move that had been played by players as familiar as Igor Kovalenko, Rustam Kasimdzhanov and Paco Vallejo, with the latter tweeting the lapidary:

Karjakin thought the move had been played in other positions, but not this one, and spent a full 25 minutes before coming up with 10…b6, looking to capitalise with 11…Ba6. Magnus repeated Kasimdzhanov’s 11.Re1, which led to one of the funniest moments of the post-game press conference. When Anastasia Karlovich asked if 10.Re2 had been a slip Magnus decided to roll with it and drew laughter with:

“Yeah, it slipped out of my hand, so I moved it back to e1 the next move!”

So a quarter of the match has already gone by and the players are still locked together:

Tune in at 2pm EST (8pm CET) on Tuesday.

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23-year-old Yaroslav Zherebukh has joined Wesley So in the US Championship lead after outplaying world no. 3 and defending champion Fabiano Caruana. Elsewhere it was the day of the veterans, with Alexander Shabalov simply needing to remember computer analysis to beat Jeffery Xiong, while Daniel Naroditsky paid a heavy price for taking Gata Kamsky into a Ruy Lopez line the former World Championship Challenger had been playing all his life.

Last year Fabiano Caruana won the US Championship with an unbeaten +6. This year’s tournament has been very different, with a Round 7 disaster knocking Fabi back to 50%.

See also:

• Official website
• The US Chess Championships on chess24: Overall | Women
• US Chess Championship, Round 1: So and Nakamura strike first
• US Chess Championship, Round 2: Fighting chess
• US Chess Championship, Round 3: So survives Caruana scare
• US Chess Championship, Round 4: Wesley’s gamble pays off
• US Chess Championship, Round 5: Kamsky shocks Xiong
• US Chess Championship, Round 6: So’s close shave

One year since the bombshell announcement that DeepMind’s AlphaZero needed only the rules of chess and four hours of self-play to be able to beat Stockfish in a match, the long-awaited full paper has now been published in the academic journal Science. We have new games – Matthew Sadler has produced videos about five of them – and what seems conclusive evidence of AlphaZero’s superiority. It won a new match 574.5:425.5, despite Stockfish running in a powerful configuration and managing its own time. AlphaZero also won when given just 1/10th of the time to think.

AlphaZero would be extraordinary even if it had only reached “human” levels of attainment. It began as AlphaGo, that learned from human games to become the world’s best Go player, then developed into AlphaGoZero, that managed to surpass AlphaGo merely by playing against itself with no human input. AlphaZero is the new generalised version of that “reinforcement and search algorithm”, that the DeepMind team have shown can master multiple games – chess, shogi and Go – knowing only the rules. In the case of chess AlphaGo needed 300,000 of the 700,000 “steps” it took while training – just 4 hours (of 9 in total) – to reach a level at which it was beating Stockfish.

During the World Championship match we were featuring content from 2-time British Champion Matthew Sadler and WIM Natasha Regan, who are co-authoring Game Changer. They appear in this short video looking at AlphaZero:

See also:

• DeepMind on AlphaZero
• The full AlphaZero paper for Science
• Matthew Sadler’s chess24 profile
• Matthew Sadler’s chess24 video series
• Jan Gustafsson: Learn from AlphaZero & beat the Queen’s Indian
• AlphaZero crushes chess
• Carlsen-Caruana 2018 World Championship games
• AlphaZero on Carlsen-Caruana Games 1-8
• AlphaZero on Carlsen-Caruana Games 9-12