The Last Chance Qualifier for the Esports World Cup chess event is underway in Riyadh, with 16 players set to battle for the final four places in the main tournament. Held from 24 to 26 July, the qualifier began with a two-day group stage and concludes with a double-elimination knockout on Saturday. The winners will join twelve invited players, including Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura and Alireza Firouzja, in the $1.5 million main event starting on 29 July. | Photos: Aditya Sur Roy / ChessBase India

The 2025 US Chess Championships for Juniors, Girls and Seniors produced three new title-holders. Andy Woodward secured first place in the Junior section with 6½/9, while top seed Zoey Tang finished half a point ahead of Megan Paragua to win the Girls' Junior Championship. In the Senior Championship, Alexander Fishbein triumphed in a three-way playoff against Vladimir Akopian and Alexander Shabalov to claim his first title in the event. | Photo: Lennart Ootes / Saint Louis Chess Club

The opening is tricky. If you don't know what you are doing, you can quickly find yourself on the losing side, but if you know what you are doing, you can also quickly gain an advantage. ChessBase offers help! The Opening Encyclopaedia offers a complete overview of all openings, and with Fritz 20 you can try out and practise all of them. This week (21–27 July), the strong duo is available as a Summer Special at a special price!

Over the past 20 years Larry List has curated exhibitions, and written primarily about the interrelationships between chess and visual art. To coincide with a Man Ray exhibition of photos at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this September, Hirmer Verlag of Munich is publishing his new book On Man Ray, the closest artist friend of the famous 20th century artist Marcel Duchamp. It is lavishly illustrated with color photos, with a solid and attractive layout. | Man Ray self-portrait 1926 Centre Pompidou

Last week Problem expert Werner Keym gave us some remarkable chess problems to solve. They were from his latest eBook, Problem Chess Art, which is available to everyone, free of charge. Here today are the solutions of the problems he selected for us. Were you able to solve them?

They are absolutely vital. Gukesh won the World Championship with one – or we could say Ding Liren lost his title because he misplayed it. So can you understand and play pawn endings proficiently? Take a look at this position: White has six legal moves, all with his king. But only one of them ensures the win. Which one? We have four instructive and entertaining positions that will test your skills. And hopefully leave you a better, more effective player.

To mark the launch of a new community chess club, pupils from The Pointer School played a game of chess 52 metres above London atop the O2 Arena. The initiative aims to make structured chess coaching freely accessible to primary school children across Greenwich and South East London. Backed by a strong chess tradition and alumni like Shreyas Royal, the school continues to promote chess as a powerful tool for personal development.

In our previous article on historical chess statistics we showed you the number of rated players there were in 1993, their ages, ratings, and where they came from. Today we compare them with the current FIDE statistics, showing how things have developed in the three decades that have passed. Our report also contains a little puzzle for you to mull over – why does the chess superpower China have so few rated players?

The ChessBase Premium Account is a powerful all-in-one chess improvement tool that provides extensive online resources, training, playing opportunities, and cloud services to help players of all levels enhance their game effectively. And the service runs on anything: Windows, Macs, notebooks, tablets, your mobile phone. Watch this video by Sagar Shah explaining the services you get and how to best use it. And best of all: it will only cost you €4.99 per month!

The Arbiters’ Council of the European Chess Union asked Prof. Kenneth W. Regan to write a dissemination article about his system, to let every arbiter get acquainted with this very important anti-cheating tool. The article has been written in aw way to make the system understandable without any particular mathematical skill, in order to have the concept behind known to every arbiter. It appeared in the April issue of the ECU Magazine.

The 13th edition of the Norway Chess super-tournament is taking place from 26 May to 6 June in Stavanger. An open event and a women's event are being played concurrently with an identical number of players, the same format and an equivalent prize fund. Both world champions — Ju Wenjun and Gukesh Dommaraju — are participating, besides world number one Magnus Carlsen. | Follow the games live starting at 17.00 CEST (11.00 ET, 20.30 IST)

Last year FIDE celebrated its 100th anniversary. The book "100 Years of FIDE" is an illustrated history of the World Chess Federation. From it we excerpt passages, with kind permission, this time from the first World Championships in the post-war era – after the sudden death of World Champion Alexander Alekhine. It is a great chance to brush up your knowledge of chess history.