Happy Birthday to Swedish chess legend Pia Cramling, who turns 59 today! In 1992 she became the 5th woman to earn the title of chess Grandmaster. Since the early 80s, she has been one of the strongest female players in the world, having topped the rating list on several occasions Pia joined a chess club in Stockholm when she was 10 and played in her first tournament at 12. Just three years later, she was part of Sweden’s team at the women’s Olympiad. Four times, from 1990-2000, she also made it into the Swedish team in the open section of the Olympiad.

Today is #WorldBookDay! It has often been said that there have been more books published on chess than all other sports combined. While this statement should be taken with a grain of salt, a fair estimation is that more than 100,000 chess books have been published. The first comprehensive book dealing with chess was the Kitab ash-shatranj (Book of the chess), written in Arabic by Al-Adli ar Rumi around the year 850. The original is long lost, but we know of it through later works that preserved some of its texts and chess problems.

Tomorrow, 23 April 2022, from 13.00 to 16.00 CET will see a solidarity match between teams from Norway and Ukraine. Magnus Carlsen leads the Norwegian team, while former world number two Vasyl Ivanchuk leads the Ukrainian side.

📷: @NastiaKarlovich The match is a joint initiative by the Good Knight Pub (Kristoffer Gressli), the Lviv Chess Federation (Oleksandr Prohorov), the Offerspill Chess Club (Jon Kristian Haar) and ChessTech (Stefan Löffler).

FIDE Ethics imposes a 6-month ban on Karjakin

The FIDE Ethics and Disciplinary Commission (EDC) has reached a verdict on the case 2/2022, relating to public statements by grandmasters Sergey Karjakin (FIDE ID 14109603) and Sergei Shipov (FIDE ID 4113624). 1/5 Sergey Karjakin is found guilty of breach of article 2.2.10 of the FIDE Code of Ethics, and is sanctioned to a worldwide ban of six months from participating as a player in any FIDE-rated chess competition, taking effect from the date of this decision, 21 March 2022. 2/5

Today, on February 27, 2022, an extraordinary meeting of the FIDE Council was held on the current situation and the urgent measures to be taken after the military action launched by Russia in Ukraine.

➡️ fide.com/news/1603 As stated by FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich, the FIDE Council regards its main mission in preserving the unity of FIDE and respecting the basic human rights enshrined in the FIDE Charter. In this regard, the FIDE Council has adopted a number of important emergency decisions.

On this day, 28 years ago, Hou Yifan, one of the strongest and most emblematic women chess players, was born in China. #womeninchess

📷 Andreas Kontokanis, Source: Wikipedia
(1/4) What you need to know about Hou Yifan:
◻️she is a 4-time Women's World Chess Champion,
◼️she is the 2nd-highest rated female player of all time,
◻️at the age of 14 years, 6 months, 2 days, she became the youngest female player to earn the Grandmaster title,
(2/4)

As FIDE heads into its centenary year, we are looking forward to the celebrations with excitement. Some plans are already being developed as part of what has been named the “FIDE 100-year anniversary project”, led by Willy Iclicki and the FIDE Historical Committee. A centenary is also a great occasion to look back and cherish the memories and the history of our institution. With that purpose, FIDE is currently making an effort to rebuild its historical archives, gathering documents and memorabilia.

After more than one year of preparation, FIDE is launching Chess ID, one of our most ambitious and long-term development projects. For more details, we invite you to read this news release:

fide.com/news/684 The purpose of Chess ID is to tackle two of the main problems that have to be solved in order to provide more effective services and tools for the worldwide chess community: lack of hard data, and fragmentation. How big the chess community really is?