Geometries and Relativities

Veselin Aleksandrov Topalov – Garry Kimovich Kasparov

Clutch Chess: The Legends; match game 9; time control: 25 minutes plus 10 seconds per move; Saint Louis, September 13, 2026

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Position 89

1. g3 c6 2. e4 g6 3. c3 d5 4. Nb3 Bd7 5. 0-0 dxe4 6. Qxe4 Bh3 7. Bg4 Bxg4 8. Qxg4 f5 9. Qe2 Nd7 10. d4 Qf6 11. N1d2 e5 12. Nc4 e4 13. Bd2 b5 14. Ne5 Nab6 15. c4 bxc4 16. Nxd7+ Nxd7 17. Qxc4 Qf7 18. Qa6 Nb6 19. d5 0-0 20. dxc6 Bf6 21. Rc2 Rfe8 22. Rfc1 Nd5 23. c7 Be5 24. Qa4

Not Kasparov’s best game, but not his worst so far either, as he survived all its gross disadvantages and could finally launch a rescue counterattack.
24. ... f4! 25. Qxe4 fxg3 26. fxg3 Bxg3 27. Qg2 Bxc7 28. Kh1 Rcd8 29. Rf1 Qe6 30. Nd4 Qe4 31. Qxe4 Rxe4 32. Nc6 Rde8 33. Rc5

33. ... Re2! Vintage Kasparov. Speculatively speaking, Black’s initiative may well appear dangerous enough to hunt for an adversary on the run.
34. Rxd5 Rxh2+ 35. Kg1 Ree2 36. Re1?? And Topalov falls in his ghosts’ eyes! The only move was 36. Ne7+! Rxe7 (any King's move would lead to disaster: 36. ... Kh8?? 37. Rd8+! Bxd8 38. Bc3+ and mate next, or 36. ... Kg7?? 37. Bc3+ Kh6 38. Ng8#) 37. Bb4 Ree2 38. Rf8+ Kg7 39. Rd7+ Kh6 40. Rxc7 Reg2+ 41. Kf1 Rxb2 42. Kg1 Rbg2+ 43. Kf1 Rxa2 44. Kg1 Rag2+ 45. Kf1 Rb2 46. Kg1 with a draw.
36. ... Bb6+ 37. Nd4 Reg2+ 38. Kf1 Rxd2 0–1.

We cannot stop time, but time can stop us. Photo: Austin Fuller/Saint Louis Chess Club.

The Old Guard

Garry Kimovich Kasparov – Veselin Aleksandrov Topalov

Clutch Chess: The Legends; match game 5; time control: 25 minutes plus 10 seconds per move; Saint Louis, September 12, 2026

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Position 668

1. c3 c6 2. d4 f6 3. e4 e5 4. f3 Bc7 5. Nd2 Nb6 6. a4 d5 7. a5 Nbd7? Gives White a large space advantage. The Knight should have gone to c4.
8. a6 b6 9. Nd3 Bd6 10. Bc2 Ng6 11. h4 h5 12. exd5 cxd5 13. 0-0-0 Bf7 14. Kb1 0-0-0 15. g3 Qf8 16. Ba4 exd4 17. cxd4 Rxe1 18. Rxe1 Kb8 19. Qh3 Be8 20. g4 hxg4 21. fxg4 Nf4 22. Nxf4 Bxf4 23. Bh2 Qd6 24. Bxf4 Qxf4

25. Qc3? In his prime, Kasparov wasn’t one to let his advantage slip away, but time is a merciless master. The winning move was 25. Qa3!, followed as soon as possible by either Re1-e7 or Qa3-e7 — it may be also noted that the Knight is taboo because of mate in three (25. ... Qxd2 26. Qd6+ Kc8 27. Qc6+ Kb8 28. Qb7#).
25. ... Bg6+ 26. Ka2 Nc5 27. Bb5 Ne4 28. Qc6 Qc7 29. Qxc7+ Kxc7 30. Rc1+ Kb8 31. Nb1 Nf2 32. h5 Bf7 33. Re1 Ne4 34. Nc3 Be6 35. Ka3. White shed a Pawn to ensure a draw. On the other hand, 35. Rg1 Ng5 would not give anything, either.
35. ... Bxg4 36. Nxe4 dxe4 37. Rxe4 Bxh5 38. Re7 Bf3 39. Rxg7 Rxd4 40. Rg8+ Kc7 41. Rg7+ Kb8 42. Rg8+ Kc7 43. Rg7+ ½–½.

Despite the outcome, one can’t help but note that Kasparov still plays chess better than most. Photo: Crystal Fuller/Saint Louis Chess Club.

Lost in Translation

11th World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer and Florencio Campomanes enjoy a leisure visit to Paete, Laguna, Philippines, Wednesday, October 24, 1973. Photos via Paete, Laguna. Courtesy of Luchie Carolino Adea.

On Contemporaneity

Garry Kimovich Kasparov – Veselin Aleksandrov Topalov

Clutch Chess: The Legends; match game 4; time control: 5 minutes plus 3 seconds per move; Saint Louis, September 11, 2026

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Position 742

1. d4 d5 2. Nd3 f6 3. f3 Nc6 4. e4 dxe4? Leaves White in command of the centre. 4. ... e5! would be the proper reply.
5. fxe4 e5 6. d5 Nb4 7. a3 Nxd3 8. Bxd3 Nd6 9. c4 f5 10. Nc3! fxe4 11. Be2! As a corollary of his strategy, Kasparov temporarily sacrifices a Pawn to keep his strongholds in the centre. 11. Nxe4? Bf5 leads nowhere for White.
11. ... b6 12. Be3 Ba6 13. Qf1 c5? After this, Black’s position soon falls apart. However, if 13. ... Qf7 then 14. Qxf7 Nxf7 15. Nxe4 with a dominating position.

14. b4! g6 15. g4 Qf7 16. Qxf7 Nxf7 17. bxc5 bxc5 18. Rf1. From an aesthetic point of view, 18. 0-0 may be even more consistent with a “freestyle” (Fischerandom) attitude.
18. ... Nd6 19. Bxc5 0-0-0 20. Bxd6 Bxd6 21. Nxe4 Bc7 22. Kc2 Bb6 23. Rf6 Kb8 24. Kd2 Ba5+ 25. Ke3 Bc8 26. Rb1+ Ka8 27. Bf3 a6 28. d6 Ka7 29. c5 Bd7 30. Rf7 Rhf8

31. Nf6!! 1–0. For after 31. ... Rxf7 32. Rb7+ Ka8 33. Rxd7+ Kb8 34. Rxf7 mate follows in a few moves.

The Beast of Baku is back on stage again. Photo: Austin Fuller/Saint Louis Chess Club.

Kubrick’s Monolith

Women pose for a picture next to a monument of a young 毛泽东 (Máo Zédōng) in 长沙 (Chǎngshā), 湖南省 (Húnán province), China, on the 50th anniversary of the death of the late Chinese communist leader. Photo: Andrés Martínez Casares/EPA.

A Way Through

Forbidden Notebook

The Queen’s squeeze

Yaacov Bleiman – Roberto Cosulich
21st Chess Olympiad Final B; Nice, June 21, 1974
4r3/4b2k/5R2/3p1P1q/pP2p1pP/P5P1/1B2Q2K/8 w - - 0 59

Comments by FIDE Master Israel Gelfer, Positional Chess Handbook, Dover Publications, Inc., Minneola, N. Y., 2001, p. 167.

In this delicately balanced position White surprised Black with the unexpected 59. Qa6!! quickly turning the tables in his favour.
59. ... Rg8. If now 59. ... Bxf6 60. Qxf6 Rg8 61. Qe7+ Kh6 and 62. Bc1+.
60. Qb7! 1–0. The end could be: 60. Qb7! Rg7 61. Rg6! Rf7 62. Qxd5 Qxf5 63. Rg7+.

The Multiverse R&B

Successfully Failed

The failure of humanity

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 1, 2026

For those questioning the fates of humanity today, it is useful to reflect on the legal concept of bankruptcy. The filing for bankruptcy by an entrepreneur facing serious financial difficulties and being unable to meet his debts is intended, first and foremost, to protect creditors, but, at the same time, to limit the debtor’s liability, excluding from bankruptcy his personal assets and rights and anything necessary for his and his family’s provision. An important figure is the receiver (or receivers), appointed by the judge to administer the bankruptcy estate and carry out the necessary operations to satisfy the creditors’ interests and protect the bankrupt debtor. For their part creditors constitute a committee which collaborates with the receiver in carrying out the necessary procedures.
One may assimilate the current condition of humanity to that of an entrepreneur compelled to declare his own bankruptcy. Since it is certain that humanity is no longer able to meet the debts progressively incurred with respect to the earth on which it lives (including the atmosphere, no less contaminated than the soil). The creditors’ committee would include, in addition to representatives of the earth and air in all its aspects, also those of extinct living species or which are threatened with extinction. As for the receivers, they could form a committee, which would include wise men appointed by each nation, with the aim of satisfying the creditors’ interests, while trying at the same time to ensure the survival of failed humanity. One might question whether this procedure would succeed in achieving its intended purposes, but it is certain that it represents the only concrete possibility of salvation for a humanity in a state of complete spiritual disorder (which, as always, translates into disorder in any spheres of life). To believe, as today one often pretends to believe, that individual states and international organisations can reconcile their economic and political interests with their own survival, without radically acknowledging their state of failure and insolvency with respect to the earth they inhabit, is an illusion, often grounded in bad faith.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Francis A. Willey, The Tempest, 2009. Courtesy of WikiArt.

You can do nothing about it, Edna. Sometimes one who takes an interest in lost causes, will appear to the public as noble and idealistic as Don Quixote

Artwork © Jose-Ramiro

Cloud 9

11th World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer (left) on cloud nine shares his joy with Miguel Quinteros (right) immediately after winning the thirtieth and final game of the “World Chess Championship Revenge Match of the Twentieth Century” against Boris Vasilievich Spassky in Belgrade, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, on Thursday, November 5, 1992. Photo: Miguel Quinteros.

Once Upon a Yugoslavia

President of Serbia Slobodan Milošević welcoming 11th World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer in Belgrade, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, on Tuesday, October 6, 1992. Video: Al Jazeera via Malina.

Upon Nothing

Give us this day our daily nothing

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, 27 agosto 2026

In a book published at Leipzig in October 1844 by the publisher Wigand, a not unknown at all kind of man makes his appearance, one who seemed intolerable and unprecedented to his contemporaries, but who has since become perfectly familiar to us: the man who, as we read on the first and last page, “founded his cause on nothing”, i.e. a being in whom the dissolution of all faith and values reached its extreme form. He is certainly the first and unsurpassed nihilist, provided one points out that the nihilism here in question has today become the normal condition of humanity. The book is titled The Ego and Its Own, author Max Stirner.
Eighteen years later, in the magazine Russian Messenger, Turgenev published the novel in which the type of nihilist (the word makes here its appearance), incarnated by the protagonist Bazarov, is defined as follows: “a nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has”. In Demons, published in volume form in 1873, Dostoevsy decides to confront the epochal problem of nihilism, particularly through the figure of Kirillov. From the nihilistic denial of the existence of God, Kirillov draws a radical consequence which both absolutises and upsets his very ego. “If there is no God,” — he asserts — “I am God. [...] If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will... It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is — for me to kill myself... There is no higher idea to me than the idea that there is no God... Man has always invented God in order to make it possible for him not to kill himself: that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I alone on earth and in the history of the universe do not want to invent God”.
It is by meditating on these pages that Nietzsche thinks of the death of God as the fundamental event of modernity: “The greatest recent event — that ‘God has died’, that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable — is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. [...] But in the main one may say: the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet”.
For both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the death of God and the advent of nihilism meant something so terrible that mankind could never accept it without questioning its very existence. For once, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were not good prophets. Nihilism became the normal condition of humanity, but, unlike Kirillov, the ordinary man seems now to live with the death of God and nihilism without suffering or caring about it, literally as if nothing had happened. It is this dull and indifferent nihilism that we deal with; it is this normal daily nothing that we must account for. And if, as Nietzsche himself suggested, nihilism, accomplished and seized as such, is humanity’s great opportunity to escape its fatal destiny, i.e. if, as Benjamin thought, nihilism can become the method of a new politics, then the question we must ask ourselves is: “Why was this opportunity not taken? What prevented us from truly laying our cause on nothing and, instead of making it our normal condition, finding in it a way out of the fates of the West?”.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Ilya Yefimovich Repin, Student Nihilist, 1883. Courtesy of WikiArt.

The Unknown Photographer

Clarice Benini (right) v Vera Francevna Menchik (left), 6th Women’s World Chess Championship, Stockholm, August 6, 1937. Mission: impossible. Photo: L’Italia Scacchistica, Nos. 8-9, September 15, 1937, p. 141.

Freestyle rap

EXTENDOKIMMIE · Checkmate (HOU YIFAN FREESTYLE)-[prod by croco dead beat]

K through Twelve

Rhythm and Blues Goes to Central Park

A Velvet Voice

Summer Days

The Apple in the Garden

Phone Calls from Heaven

In an article of his for ChessBase.com, titled “Quo vadis, Fischer Random Chess? (1)”, Frederic Friedel recounts his phone conversations about Fischerandom chess with its inventor, 11th World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer. The content is particularly interesting, as it confirms that, even shortly before his death, Fischer dreamed to play a Fischerandom chess match with Viswanathan Anand sponsored by ChessBase — but the German company was not willing to fulfil Fischer’s financial requests.
Friedel put forward various proposals to make Fischerandom chess more suitable to the average woodpusher’s understanding, including Garry Kimovich Kasparov’s suggestion to downsize the number of opening positions from 960 to 10. At first, Fischer was receptive, probably out of etiquette, but as soon as he knew who the idea came from, receptivity immediately turned into hostility: “No, there’s a trick. He has preparation for special positions or something”.
A must read!

Fischer featuring the worldwide launch of his trademark Fischerandom chess at Pasaje Dardo Rocha in the city of La Plata, Argentina, on July 11, 1996. Photo: Juan Sebastián Morgado.

In Belgrade Once Again

Shown above are three screenshots from a grainy, low-quality video footage of Bobby Fischer’s visit to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in October 1978, which was his almost first public appearance, after he had lived for six years obscurely in his basement at Pasadena, California, United States. On Friday, October 20, 1978, an AP wire story regarding a possible Fischer’s comeback broke worldwide as he flew to Yugoslavia to meet Grandmaster Svetozar Gligorić and discuss the possibility of a chess match with him, as well as to back Gligorić’s candidacy for President of FIDE. But alas for Caïssa’s hopes, neither one nor the other was the choice of the chess world. Photos via Baron Rich.

TL;DR

A woman uses the new IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in a New York office in 1954. Photo: Underwood Archives, Inc/Alamy.

Once Upon A Monday

Professor Antonio Rosino † and four-time Women’s World Chess Champion 侯逸凡 (Hóu Yìfán) enjoying sunset at Venice, Italy, on Monday, February 3, 2014. Photo: Lorenzo/Associazione Culturale “Il Delta della Luna”.