- Welcome to another edition of "Today in Chess."

I'm your host, Sharon Carpenter.

The 2024 US and US Women's Chess Championships feature 24 of America's best male and female players.

The tournaments always offer exhilarating game play and high stakes action.

(dramatic music) - Welcome back to US Chess Championships, Fabi.

It's really nice to see you again playing here.

And of course, you won this tournament three times before, and I was wondering if you have the same motivation to win this one or you take it as a fresh start every time?

- No, I think even more motivation because I won it last year.

I think even more motivation to do well this year as well.

And yeah, I just take it as a new tournament.

Of course, the first time always feels like the most important, right?

But after I won for the first time in 2016, it was even my first time playing.

Then for many years I didn't have another chance to win, or I had some chances, but I was spoiling them, and I was watching other players constantly winning the tournament.

And so it feels good in the last few years that I came back to my senses in this tournament.

And I put some good performances the last two years.

I think I was also helped by the fact that other players were not maybe at their best in terms of trying to get, like, a huge score.

So for example in 2022, +4 was enough, and some years it wouldn't be enough.

Like when Sam Shankland won, I scored +5.

It wasn't enough, so.

But yeah, I definitely have a lot of motivation to do well.

And just because I won it last year doesn't change anything.

- Well, I wish you all the best and of course all the best in the chess in the US Chess Championships.

Thank you for your time, Fabi.

Thank you.

- Thank you, thank you.

How do you prepare for important chess tournaments or matches.

- Yeah, well, first of all, I think it's good to make time to prepare.

You know, you start looking at your opponent's games.

You start thinking about what you wanna do against each of them.

I guess preparing for tournaments, a lot of it is, like, opening work, and you know, partly also just trying to stay sharp.

Sometimes, I play training games.

- Improving my calculation, getting to play some training games, working on my openings.

And I mean, there's always a little bit of luck too.

- Just no secrets.

Solving tactics, repeating openings.

- Every tournament is different.

So for a tournament like this where I more or less know who I'm going to be playing ahead of time, I look up my opponents.

I try to fix up some of the holes in my openings.

Generally in chess right now, there's a lot of focus on openings.

So you know, there's gonna be a lot of targeted preparation.

So that's the main focus.

And lately I've been switching up my preparation a bit.

I've been focusing more on playing games before a tournament, playing against my training partners, and then looking up the openings and trying to fix that.

So I've been shifting a little more towards that.

And of course, as you get closer to the tournament, you start working on your calculation, make sure you're sharp right before a tournament.

- Well, I train a lot of time on openings and calculation mostly.

Just work a lot on chess.

- I think it's really dependent on, like, my current state.

So you know, right now I'm in school, so it really depends.

But I mean, I try my best to look at every opponent beforehand and then just get warmed up in general.

I think I used to take it a lot differently before I came to college, like four years ago.

But now I'm just, you know, trying to do as much as I can before.

- For a tournament like US Championship, you need to prepare mentally first.

Because last year it was my first time, and even though I was prepared, I couldn't, you know, show my best.

So I think it's very important that you get familiar with the environment and just have a positive, you know, mindset going to the games.

So I think, yeah, more or less, like, opening preparation, tactics and just mental preparation for it.

- More than just a key element to the game, chess boards often reflect the history of chess in various ways.

Some carry ancient markings or inscriptions, while others are known to have been used by the most famous grandmasters.

Each board has its own story.

We recently met with Shannon Bailey to discuss one of the most historically significant chess boards of all time.

- While this looks like a very simple chess board and set, together, they mark one of the most important moments in American chess history.

This wooden board actually has the signatures of both Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky who played in the 1972 World Chess Championship which wasn't just a match against two players.

It was really the battle of the Cold War on a chess board.

This board was actually not used in the World Chess Championship.

Bobby Fischer, who was known to be very particular and often sometimes quite difficult during a chess match, he had very specific stipulations and rules about the size of the board, the size of the pieces, the lighting, the camera, any noises going on around him, didn't approve of these boards that were made.

10 total were made in this exact size and shape.

While he didn't like them, he had other ones made that they played on.

But the organizers in Reykjavik where the World Chess Championship took place, needed to make money off of the event because Bobby was being difficult and not allowing certain cameras and different companies to record him.

So they said, "You have to sign these, and we're going to sell them as souvenirs."

The set, however, was used in the most critical and crucial game of the World Chess Championship.

Prior to playing in the summer of 1972, Bobby Fischer had played Boris Spassky several times but had never won.

He had lost three games and drawn two, which is a tie.

Fischer shows up to play in the World Chess Championship in Reykjavik, and he loses the first game in the series.

The second game, he doesn't show up 'cause he's very frustrated.

So he's already down 0-2.

That was a forfeit.

He came back for game three and said, "I will only play if I'm not playing in front of the cameras.

I'm not playing in front of all of the spectators in the arena.

I wanna play in a separate room."

So everybody agreed, and Bobby and Boris played in a secret room behind the stage with this exact set in game three.

This was the first time Bobby Fischer ever defeated Boris Spassky.

On July 16th, 1972, Bobby Fischer changed the entire World Chess Championship with that match.

He went on to win the entire championship, ending 24 years of Soviet domination, and at the age of 29, became the first American-born citizen to be the world chess champion.

- Grandmaster Peter Svidler, an eight-time Russian chess champion known for his deep opening preparation, strategic brilliance, and incredible versatility, has battled amongst the world's best for decades.

He's emerged victorious time and time again.

I had the privilege of sitting down with him to discuss his legendary legacy.

(upbeat music) Joining me right now is Grandmaster Peter Svidler.

It's great to see you, Peter.

- Very nice to meet you.

- And we've seen a ton of you, obviously, on all of the chess broadcasts.

It's been a really busy past few months for you.

- Absolutely.

I love coming back here, and this is a home away from home these days.

I get to work in St. Louis almost every year since I first got invited as a stand-in last minute in 2014.

And this is a very enjoyable group of people to work with.

So I feel very happy to be here.

- So you were six years old when you first learned to play chess.

And then by the time you were 13, you competed in your first major tournament.

Is that correct?

- As somebody who has kids myself these days, one thing I always think back and kind of wonder is just how lucky my parents got because my dad showed me the pieces when I was 6 1/2, and they did not have any more decisions to make, basically, with this particular child 'cause it was always pretty clear what I'll be doing with my life.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- From that early on, you just fell in love with the game instantly.

- Yeah, they couldn't drag me away from the board.

It became immediately obvious.

Well, maybe not at 6 1/2, but the moment it became sort of obvious I actually not only liked the game, but also have some gift for the game.

They really didn't have to think anymore because it was a natural progression from, you know, learning how to play to junior tournaments and then serious tournaments and so on.

And as somebody who has not had such an easy time of finding things that my kids love, it's a very enviable situation to find yourself.

- Ah yeah, like, your parents were lucky?

- I think so, yeah.

- And of course that progression took you to becoming a eight-time Russian champion, a three-time candidate for the world championship as well.

I mean, you've had a tremendous amount of success.

- The thing about chess is it's an incredibly beautiful, rich and wonderful game.

But it is still a board game.

One of the sort of early tests for parents when, let's say, if parents have to make a choice whether to sort of push their child in that direction or not, if it feels like a job when you're nine, you should probably do something else.

- So when you were introduced to chess, it was more for fun.

It wasn't your parents saying, "Okay, we wanna push you in this direction."

- No, no, no.

Because of the status that chess had in Soviet Union, it was a very natural thing for parents to try for their male offspring in particular but for the girls as well.

And let's say in Georgia, the situation was inversed.

In Georgia, pretty much every single girl would've tried chess and maybe not every single boy.

- Interesting.

- So- - Why?

- I have no idea.

- It's just this weird phenomenon that the Georgian chess school produced a bunch of absolutely fantastic women players and of course some men players as well.

But there, the balance was a lot closer to 50/50 than I think elsewhere in the country.

But I became a grandmaster at 18.

And when I did, it was a good result.

We weren't, like, popping champagne, but it was a perfectly acceptable timetable to becoming a grandmaster.

And these days, most of the people you see, you know, topping the list of promising juniors, they would've been grandmaster by 15, certainly, probably by 14 even.

And those who break the records at 12, they are the, you know, the creme de la creme.

If you have interest and you're willing to invest time and energy into it, there is just so many tools available to kids in the 2020s and the 2010s already that weren't available to us when we were growing up in the 1980s that it does compress the timeline a great deal.

- But we do have to celebrate your achievements nonetheless.

- If we have to.

- (laughing) Right?

You're very modest, you're very modest.

Again, eight-time Russian champion.

At one point you were number three or four in the world.

- Four, for sure.

Three, I'm not that certain about.

- Yeah.

So to you looking back on everything that you've achieved, do you have sort of this shining moment that to you was like, has been the pinnacle so far.

- To name one, probably the proudest thing I've done is winning the World Cup.

And kind of relatedly, the saddest thing I've done is not win it the second time because I was basically one move away from winning it the second time, and I had a bit of a brain fade and ended up not winning it.

And that still haunts me to this day.

- Does it?

- It's been almost 10 years.

And yeah, this thing is probably, once again, sticking with me forever now.

- I do wanna ask you, because you work with a lot of the younger players now, as you mentioned, what advice do you give to them in terms of preparing for tournaments and not getting in their own heads and not holding on to losses?

- Yeah, mental preparation is arguably maybe even more important than, once you get to a certain level.

I mean, before you become really, really strong, improving your game takes precedence over everything else.

- But once you get to a certain level, keeping a level ahead, being able to deal with losses, those things, motivating yourself to play every game to your best ability, those things become of paramount importance.

- Well Peter, thank you so much for joining us.

It's always great to see you.

- It's a pleasure talking to you.

- Thank you.

Chess 9LX is an innovative and unique variant of chess that's emerged as a creative way to revitalize the traditional game.

It aims to add an extra layer of excitement and challenge to the classical rules.

International Master Kostya Kavutskiy explains how the variation is played.

- Chess 9LX is a very fun chess variant that is actually very popular among the top professional players.

And the reason is that it allows them to be creative in the opening stage of the game without having to spend tons of time studying and memorizing openings before the game.

Chess 9XL is actually very similar to chess.

It has all the same rules as chess.

The only difference is that the starting position of the games are different.

You randomize the order of the pieces on the starting row, and this changes the game quite dramatically.

The history of Chess 9LX is actually quite interesting.

It was invented by the American World Champion Bobby Fischer who originally called the game Fischer Random.

And then at one point people started calling it Chess 960 with 960 being the number of different starting positions you could have at the beginning of the game.

And recently, Saint Louis Chess Club rebranded the game as Chess 9LX to put their own spin on it for their upcoming tournament.

So the way Chess 9LX is a bit different to chess, it has all the same rules in chess.

All the pieces move the same, everything works the same.

The only difference is the starting position.

And when you rearrange the pieces at the start, it changes the opening a bit.

It changes a lot of the creative strategies that go into the game, and it really forces players to have to think on their own right from the very beginning.

So this causes them to spend a lot of time in the opening.

They have to make a lot of really important decisions early on as well.

And the games end up being very complicated and very sharp pretty much throughout.

The time control is actually very important in Chess 9LX because players can't rely on their opening knowledge that they've memorized and learned from years and years of practice.

So when they don't get a lot of time in Chess 9LX, for instance, in a rapid or a blitz time control, this can cause players to have to make some really big moves right at the start of the game.

And they don't have a lot of time to do so.

So this can lead to serious mistakes, huge blunders, often more commonly than we would see in a normal chess game.

So for example, let's say we had position number 900.

That would mean that the king would be on g1.

Knight would be starting on f1.

White's rook on h1, bishops on e1 and d1, queen on a1, and knight on b1.

And for black, all the pieces would be mirrored and on the exact same square.

So king on g8, knight on f8, rook in the corner, two bishops in the center, queen in the corner as well, knight on b8 and rook on c8.

So for example, you've been playing chess your whole life.

You know all the opening strategies.

You know very well what you need to be doing in the first several moves.

Now all of a sudden you've got this position.

It's completely different than anything you're used to.

And now you've gotta figure out how to play this correctly from here.

So what a lot of players do is they still try to follow all of the main opening principles that they use in chess.

So things like controlling the center, developing the pieces, and perhaps more, most importantly, figuring out where the king is going to go.

You still wanna castle that king and get it to safety.

So if you wanna have some fun with your chess game next time you play, I would encourage you to try Chess 9LX.

- Two of the best collegiate chess teams in Missouri are going head to head.

Mizzou, winner of the 2024 Pan-American Intercollegiate Championship, and St. Louis University, the 2024 Collegiate Chess League champions will battle it out in the ultimate life-sized rapid chess match.

But who will claim the victory as the superior collegiate chess team?

- Hello, everyone, and welcome to the collegiate clash of the titans here in St. Louis.

We have Saint Louis University, Varuzhan, captain.

- Hello everybody.

- Mizzou, Captain Cristian.

You guys are the titans of chess.

You have come to the singular moment in time to determine once and for all who's the best collegiate team in the nation.

What is going on in collegiate chess?

- Oh, I have to say, that was a pretty good introduction.

- Thank you.

Yasser, congratulations.

Very well done.

- Right.

- Collegiate chess is booming right now.

We're doing quite well.

A lot of scholarships, a lot of attractive scholarships I would say.

And a lot of players from around the world are joining the two colleges that you just mentioned, SLU and Mizzou.

- Outstanding.

And Var, same for you.

- Yeah, same for you.

Yeah, we got really exciting stuff going on at SLU.

We got a lot of new players.

And in January as well, we have a couple of grandmasters joining us.

So we're gonna have a much bigger team.

But we still have three grand masters and one international master on the team.

- All right.

Welcome, gentlemen.

And what we're going to do, this is epic people.

You really gotta pay attention here.

Each side is going to have five minutes.

The coaches, the captains, cannot tell their players what to do, but the players can inform one another what they're gonna do.

Each team will take a side.

The players have to make their moves.

They have to press their clock within the five minutes, otherwise they lose.

Well, here we go.

Robby, start the clock.

And it's up.

- Here we go.

They're- - Whoa.

- They're switching the strategy right now.

Whoa, that was unexpected.

- Okay, okay.

- Queen pawn.

- Queen pawn, yeah, yeah.

- That came as a surprise.

- More positional gambit, I think.

- Right.

- Let's see, let's see.

- Oh.

- I think White's- - Oh, no gambit!

- That invites a fight but not accepted.

- And we could take, wow, they could have gone for the pawn.

- Yeah, Semi-Slav.

- Semi-Slav.

(pieces clattering) Oh, oh, oh.

- No increment, it's all about the clock right now.

This is what I'm focused on.

So keep an eye on that, Yasser.

- Okay.

So as captain, are you also eyeballs to the clock?

- Yes, yes.

- The players only have five minutes.

And as you can see, oh, oh, j'adoube, yellow card, yellow card.

(Yasser laughing) A friendly warning, a friendly warning.

And what have we got on the clock?

- A minute 17 for Mizzou.

A minute and two seconds right now for SLU.

- But it's not, it's a rook.

- It's not about the clock.

- It's a rook.

I think this is where you step in and take one for the team.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Taking one for the team!

We're gonna take a pause.

- As we gotta reset ourselves.

And congratulations, Mizzou.

Mizzou, Mizzou.

- Well, thank you.

Good game.

- We just saw an epic game one with Mizzou taking the lead, one-nothing.

Grigoriy, you're preparing yourself for the US championship.

Ambitions?

- I don't know, it's hard to say.

It's my first US champs.

(Yasser laughs) I don't even know what to expect, but I hope to show good chess.

- Absolutely.

We're looking forward to it.

Robby, US Championships coming up.

You're helping anybody in the tournament?

- Yeah, we have one of our female students on the team.

She's participating and we have- - Talia.

- Talia, yeah.

She's one of the lower rateds, but we have a good feeling about her.

She's been doing good training.

- Okay.

Thank you, Robby.

- Quick question.

How important has the Mizzou chess program been to you personally and for your chess career?

- Well, if not the Mizzou chess program, I wouldn't be here in the United States.

- That is true (laughing) to begin with.

- Yeah, I mean, it definitely helped me a lot with my chess as well.

I mean, I think I started working more in chess even though I had to study as well.

But I mean, in general, it's a whole atmosphere of chess in the United States.

- And then you got an opportunity to work with Fabi as well.

- Yeah.

- So it just fits you.

- It's also very exciting.

- Yeah, it's worked out perfectly.

Thank you.

And it's my pleasure to introduce the other two players of the team.

Mikhail, introduce yourself.

Tell the people.

- Hello, my name is Mikhail Antipov.

I am grandmaster.

I'm happy to be part of the team.

They have given me a lot of additional opportunities.

Like, I have a great chance to play chess in the US to work with strong grandmasters.

And besides that, I'm obviously pursuing a degree in university.

- Exactly.

- And I'm very thankful for such opportunity.

- Great.

- And Steven, same for you.

Introduce yourself to our audience.

Hello everyone.

I'm International Master Steve Wang.

This is my first semester at SLU.

I got introduced to it by Coach Var about two years ago.

And I hope to take the next step in my chess career while in the chess capital of the world.

- Right.

Moving up through the ranks.

IM, GM next, right?

- Of course, of course.

- That's what it's all about.

A quick question for you, Mikhail.

What's next in your career?

- Oh, that's very hard question.

I'm still trying to be professional about chess.

I'm playing a lot of open tournaments in the US.

Recently, I had some successful events.

My biggest win in US so far was Chicago Open this year- - Yes, congratulations.

- where I managed to get a clear first.

And, like, I hope to continue doing chess in US as well as sharing my knowledge with future generation of chess players.

- Fantastic, thank you.

And Steven, same question for you.

What's next for you?

- Oh well, I guess train harder, finally make GM after years of promises, and make a safe landing with my degree, and more or less do the same as Mikhail, impart my knowledge with future generations.

- Fantastic.

Well, the most immediate thing is winning the next game and evening up the match.

Good luck.

- Thank you.

- All right.

- And we're gonna be right back for game two of this epic collegiate showdown.

And we are ready for game two of the ultimate collegiate showdown.

Mikhail, start the clocks.

There was a queen e6 check.

But no.

No, they didn't fall for it.

That's why, Cristian, you guys are doing so well in the collegiate championships.

- We've had a good year, yes.

We've had a good year.

And this one, it seems to be going good as well, so.

- Oh, taking another one, Var.

- Good game.

- Good game, good match.

- There you go, folks.

SLU versus Mizzou in extra large jumbo life.

Congratulations, Mizzou.

'Til next time.

- As chess continues to make a lasting impact on players worldwide, we're honored to be a part of its rich legacy.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode.

Thank you for watching.

And we look forward to seeing you next time on "Today in Chess."

- [Announcer] This has been a presentation of the Saint Louis Chess Club.

Any reproduction or distribution of this content without the expressed written consent of the Saint Louis Chess Club is prohibited.