Ding Ding Ding! And Then Ding Went Downhill...
The best monthly chess newsletter you receive.
Issue 31 | MM Chess
It’s the 31th 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. Please let’s welcome the newest MMChess.org students: Daniel, Gavin, Amado, Rohan, Amarrah, Shimon, Frank, Shreyansh, Maya, Peter, Elliot, Ilayda, Connor, Nawaff, Tashi, Hoshea, Eli, Colton, and William!
Student Success🏆
Every month we’re highlighting some of the successes of our students. Proud of something chess-related? Send me photos!
Rio began taking lessons earlier this year with coach Ramiro. Now, he’s 1232! We interviewed his parents to try to identify what drives Rio’s success.
Congratulations to all of our students that attended the K-6 Nationals in Washington, DC! Here is a photo of Gideon R., who places second u1200 in the National Blitz (congrats coach Mike!).
Bradley T. is off to the races, winning the NHC Quad Championship and placing top-3 in the MM Monthly tournament! Congrats to him and his teacher Yeison.
My story🖼️
Every Memorial Day, my college friends and I try to get together, regardless of where we are around the world at the time. This weekend, we did it in the most American way possible - the pool and a BBQ!
Monthly Tournament♟️
📅 This month’s tournament will take place on Wednesday, June 21st, at 7pm EST (6pm CT, 5pm MT, 4pm PT). Most of the players will be rated from 500-1800. In the last tournament, there were 55 students, both kids & adults!
To Play: Reply to this email or press the big green button here. If you haven’t already, you also have to join the MM team The Zoom for the tournament is here, and the password is Smile.
Congrats last month to Omar, Shubham, and Anish! Shubham and Anish placed in the top 3 for the first time.
Chess News 📰
Learn crazy tricks from MM’s Youtube page! Last month, we covered the world championship, but this month we’re covering a number of opening tactics and difficult puzzles.
🏆 13 years of Carlsen are now in the past, the Ding Liren reign has started! Grandmaster (GM) Ding Liren is the first Chinese player to hold the open world title, ushering in a new era in chess history. This was a battle that struggled until the last minute of the matches… GM Ian Nepomniachtchi was defeated in the final fast (blitz) tiebreak game.
📉 But World Champion Ding Liren and contender Ian Nepomniachtchi lost to everybody. Right after the World Championship, they decided to play the Superbet in Romania. Not a good idea… they kept getting dunked on, placing in 8th and 9th place.
👧🏼🧒🏻 The 2023 ChessKid Cup Final’s winners. The champions in the third tournament on the $2 million 2023 Champions Chess Tour are GM Nodirbek Absattorov (Division I), GM Vladimir Fedoseev (Division II), and GM Alan Pichot (Division III).
🤐 Sergei Karjakin is claiming our favorite chess streamer, Nakamura, prearranges his games. The comment comes after a match between Hiro and Wesley So in which they ended in a draw.
💥 Abdusattorov wins the Norway Chess Blitz, while Carlsen finishes seventh. Every year, Norway (Carlsen’s host country) hosts a tournament called Norway Chess and the Norway Chess Blitz (quick chess), and most years Carlsen has won it.
Magnus Carlsen, the previous World Champion and undisputed World #1, is the favorite to win Norway Chess, but in the Blitz tournament, things didn’t go as planned. 18-year-old Nodirbek Abdusattorov blitzed the best, while Carlsen ended seventh!
🤑 After a thrilling last round, Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen takes the 1st prize of $40,000 in Poland after winning the Superbet Poland Rapid & Blitz 2023, which is the second leg of the Grand Chess Tour (GCT). Carlsen and GM Duda battled it out in a spectacular and suspenseful final round where Magnus won 13 Grand Chess Tour points and Duda $30,000 and 10 GCT points.
Caruana and Gukesh defeated world number 1 and 2 to take an early lead in the Norway Chess 2023. Caruana beat Carlsen and Gukesh beat Alireza Firouzja, respectively defeated the world number-one and number-two, GMs Magnus Carlsen and Alireza Firouzja, in the first round of Norway Chess 2023. With wins in the classical portion, they lead the tournament with 3 points each.
😭 Chess lost a “fighting spirit” on Thursday, May 11. Heartbreaking news of the premature death of 32-year-old WIM Sue Maroroa Jones, who represented New Zealand and England internationally. She was a very strong chess player that achieved the WIM title in 5 Olympiads. Rest in peace.
Fun Facts💡
🐱 In this photo, you can see WGM Susan Polgar (the former Women’s World Champion) and GM Bobby Fischer. But the protagonist here is the kitty in the middle, which the World Champion LOVED according to WGM Susan in a tweet.
🤯 The internet was raging about this. Is that a phone at the World Chess Championship?
No, of course, it’s not a phone! The most likely explanation is that due to the amount of time they have to spend sitting he had to put his wallet in his front pocket.
Or maybe he knew what was coming and decided to switch to poker, so that’s a card deck.
⭐ (G)old things you find from your childhood. Did you ever have one of these?
It was the Stockfish of the time, a chess board where you could play with a computer, and it was pretty good!
😂 Some estimates rate the rating of the computer at around 1250 USCF at its highest level, so it’s going to be a pretty good contender at least for 90% of players, nothing close to Deep Blue, the computer that beat Kasparov himself! That one weighed 2 tons.
👟In 1984, the World Chess Championship was called off after 5 months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. Grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recall that Karpov "looked like death”
Also in 2004, Rustam Kasimdzhanov lost 17 pounds during the six-game world championship. And in 2018, a U.S.-based company found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess. That's about the same number of calories that Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.
🧠 Our brain, despite constituting only 5% of our total weight, spends 20% to 40% of our total energy depending on the task at hand. This is just another example that chess is brain weightlifting!