10 Perfect Ten
Judit Polgar and Ernö Rubik united at the 10th Global Chess Festival.

12 NIC’s Café
Netflix and Jimmy Carter.

16 The Budapest Olympiad
The Indian Gold Rush.

22 The Team Captain
Looking back on India’s historic Olympiad victory, team captain Srinath Narayanan speaks about phenomenal scores, team spirit, contagious ambition, Gukesh’s revenge for 2022 and more.

28 The Olympiad in Pictures
Sixteen pages of splendour.

44 The Olympiad Games
A dozen annotated games; notes by Aronian, So, Giri and many others.

53 Celeb 64: Phil Wang

91 Boom Boom Budapest
Nine puzzles from the Olympiad, selected by Yochanan Afek.

93 Killer Blow
Nine puzzles from the Olympiad, selected by Jacob Aagaard.

96 FIDE 100 Years: Chess is a family, but with a faultline
What happened, who runs FIDE and what does the future look like?

112 The Babson Task
The ‘impossible’ in an endgame study.

116 The Chess Revolution
An extract from the fascinating new book The Chess Revolution by Peter Doggers.

122 Carlsen gets his revenge
Magnus Carlsen faced Hans Niemann in Paris, for the first time in two years. Carlsen won convincingly, and beat Firouzja in the Speed Chess final.

134 Chess as a Business
All eyes on ChessBase.

138 Get a free eBook
For all subscribers: a free eBook with more than 200 rook endgames.

140 James Altucher
The new mantra is: you always have one more chance.

143 Maximize Your Tactics
Nine puzzles, selected by Maxim Notkin.

144 Nate Solon
Identify and use your mistakes to guide your study plan.

147 Fair & Square
John von Neumann: ‘Chess isn’t a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation.’

148 The Model Game
The White Dragon. Openings with reversed colours are fascinating, as an extra tempo sometimes fundamentally changes the nature of the game.

152 The Scoresheet
Gukesh-Ding Liren, Wijk aan Zee 2024.

154 Sadler on Books
Should chess players ignore the objective truth, take risks, embrace chaos and strive to use their intuition creatively?

160 Jan Timman
With back-to-back victories in the Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz and the Sinquefield Cup, Alireza Firouzja became the undisputed winner of the Grand Chess Tour.

174 Just Checking
What is the best piece of advice that was ever given to Daaim Shabazz?