Chess Base

• Tata Steel Chess India: Anand and Niemann share the lead

  The opening day of Tata Steel Chess India in Kolkata delivered an entertaining start in both sections of the rapid tournament. In the open, Viswanathan Anand and Hans Niemann (pictured) share the lead with 2½ points after three rounds marked by a high number of decisive games. The women's event produced a sole leader in Carissa Yip, who also scored 2½ points. | Photo: Lennart Ootes

• Forty Years Ago: Kasparov vs. Hamburger SK

  At Christmas 2025, Stefan Löffler delighted readers of his chess column in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—one of Germany’s leading national newspapers—with a Christmas story. Forty years earlier, Garry Kasparov, still not yet world champion, had played a clock simul against the Bundesliga team of Hamburger SK and lost. Two years later, Kasparov returned to Hamburg as world champion. This time he won the rematch, and during the visit encountered a remarkable new development that was to change the game profoundly: a chess database.

• Christmas week puzzles solutions 3

  In the final sections of our Christmas Puzzle Week we brought you a variety of famous and less well-known puzzles. Among them a mate problem that solves itself – literally. And one that looks deceptively simple, but requires a very subtle strategy to find the win. In no less than 46 moves! Can computers solve it?