Issue 18 | MM Chess
Welcome back. It’s the 18th issue of the Mindful Masters Newsletter, the best (and only?) monthly chess newsletter you receive. I cover chess culture and relevant wisdom I've collected along the way.
In May, we welcome the newest MMChess.org students: Peng-Yu, Peng-Chi, Loriann, Sam, Anshi, Aarav, Faaiz, Bella, Ally, Jeffrey, Danny, Vihaan, Matthew, Miriam, and another Sam!
My story 🖼️
More than anything else, I owe my chess success to my parents, and specifically to my mom. Despite her not knowing how to move the pieces and barely speaking English, she found chess classes, coaches, tournaments, and spent countless weekends attending them with me. Happy early Mother’s Day, mama!
Chess Tournament This Month: May 22 ♟️
📅 Save The Date: The MM May Tournament will take place Sunday, May 22th at 11am EST/10am CT/9am MT/8am PST. Most of the players will be beginners, from 500-1500 rated. Join using the link below, or just email me (misha@mmchess.org) back.
This is the tournament link, and the Zoom (Password is Smile).
Have friends’ children that want to play? Have them join as well. If you can’t make this one, I plan to have them once a month.
Congrats to Michael (1st Place), Ray-Pan (2nd), and Yehuda (3rd) in April!
Chess News This Month 📰
🚫Chess.com was banned by the Russian government. Russia wanted to ban only a few page that talked about Ukraine, but because Chess.com uses secure https pages, they couldn’t ban just those links. So they banned the whole site!
🇺🇦 Ukraine wins over Norway. On April 23, 2022, a solidarity match between teams from Norway and Ukraine was played. Ukrainian grandmasters are still killin’ it.
🇮🇳 Praggnanandhaa crushed the first half of the Oslo Esports Cup. 16-year-old GM Praggnanandhaa was the sole leader. He crashed at the end of the tournament unfortunately, and placed 4th.
😬 Really? In a tournament last week, Magnus Carlsen forgets a bishop goes across the whole board and simply BLUNDERED His ROOK in 1 Move.
⚔️“These types of attitudes can't be accepted,” says Magnus Carlsen. The world champion has broken his silence and weighed in on FIDE's ban of Sergey Karjakin, who played him for the World Championship in 2016. Magnus believes that Karjakin, despite being a Russian shill, should still be allowed to play in international events.
💰 Chess.com will turn cool positions into NFTs. OpenSea's is partnering with Chess.com to create a new NFT chess marketplace.
🇷🇺 Top-100 Grandmasters leave Russia. A number of players voiced criticism or signed an appeal for peace. Many of them, such as 2021 Russian Champion Nikita Vitiugov, as well as other top-100 players Alexandr Predke, Dmitry Andreikin, and others, have settle abroad.
Fun Facts💡
🏆Chess.com announced the World Championship (CWC), the biggest tournament ever. It has a total prize fund of $1,000,000, including $500,000 for the final live event at the five-star 1 Hotel in Toronto, Canada.
☭ The Soviet Union dominated chess in the decades after WWII. Today, these players would be from Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Latvia.
💪Fischer Takes The Title: The Best Games Of The 1970s. “The 1972 World Chess Championship match between Fischer and Boris Spassky was a tremendous contest that ultimately concluded Fischer's untouchable 1970-1972 period (and even his career...). Game six was a breaking point and a model demonstration of how to defeat hanging pawns.”
🧠The Secrets of Zugzwang in Chess, Math and Pizza. Learn the magic and math of how to win games when your opponent goes first.