Hastings is the grandfather of international chess tournaments, first staged in 1895 and annually since 1920, with brief war and pandemic breaks. Its vintage decades were the 1930s, 50s and 70s, when world champions and challengers lined up to compete, while the badminton legend Sir George Thomas and the Bletchley Park codebreaker Hugh Alexander both shared first after defeating renowned opponents.
Nowadays, the Caplin Hastings Masters has publicity problems, sandwiched as it is between the London Classic and Tata Steel Wijk aan Zee, while this year it also coincided with the Carlsen show on Wall Street at the high-profile World Rapid/Blitz.
Its support from Hastings council has diminished, so that this year’s event lacked any GMs from the world’s top 200. Hastings had a £10,000 Masters prize fund, compared with £50,000 for the London Classic and £1m for the World Rapid/Blitz in New York.
The Sussex seaside resort maintained its reputation for unveiling new talent. China’s Xue Haowen, aged 16 years and two months, broke Judit Polgar’s 1992-93 record as the youngest ever Hastings winner when he scored an unbeaten 7/9, half a point ahead of six runners-up.
Xue is little known internationally and began the tournament without any Fide titles, but his 2502 rating and his strong track record show that he is already en route to becoming one of China’s leading players, with the potential even to rival China’s top pair, Ding Liren and Wei Yi.
After a gain of 350 rating points in just over two years, Hastings was his third and final GM norm following Dubai 2023, where he defeated Hans Niemann and achieved a 2700+ rating performance, and Arona, Spain, in 2024, which he won with an unbeaten 8/10.
Xue recently defeated the top Chinese GMs Bu Xiangzhi and Li Chao in mini-matches. His two most impressive wins at Hastings were his spectacular rook sacrifice in round seven and his imaginative attack in the penultimate round.
He is the first male grandmaster from Shenzhen, the university city where the all-time No 2 woman, Hou Yifan, now lectures on chess. Hou spent a year studying at Oxford, while Xue plans to take the Cambridge international entrance exam next term.
A six-way tie for second prize on 6.5/9 included two Englishmen. Danny Gormally at age 48 scored a strong unbeaten performance, highlighted by a brilliant round-eight win against a rival GM, which featured dynamic attacking play against the popular 2 c3 Sicilian.
England’s youngest GM, Shreyas Royal, 16 last week, was back in form after his setback at the London Classic, recovering strongly from a slow start and producing several creative games, notably in the final round to ensure shared second prize.
Hastings has a new congress director, GM Stuart Conquest, who previously directed the popular but now discontinued Gibraltar Open. Caplin Systems, which produces financial trading technology, and its chief executive, John Ashworth, continued their longstanding support.
Magnus Carlsen’s debut for newly promoted St Pauli in the German Bundesliga, the strongest chess league in Europe, got off to a winning start last week when he steadily outplayed his Dutch opponent Max Warmerdam. Carlsen spent several minutes on his black reply to 1 c4, saying: “I really wanted to play a proper game, and not to make a short draw, so 1 c4 was a very nice surprise to have because then it’s not that easy to completely flatten out the game. It showed that he had some ambition as well, so I was considering different options.”
The No 1 settled for a King’s Indian formation (Nf6,g6,Bg7, d6) followed at move nine by the sharp 9…e5-e4, which the commentators and later Carlsen himself called “a bluff”. It worked when Warmerdam avoided the critical 11th move Bg5, and the Norwegian went on to win smoothly, Carlsen said: “Everything went according to plan today. I got a nice complicated position, and from then on it seemed everything was flowing well.”
Carlsen’s second game was more downbeat. There were expectations that his opponent would be Ian Nepomniachtchi or Gukesh Dommaraju, but Düsseldorf’s top board turned out to be Wei, China’s world No 8. The game opened with a Sicilian Najdorf 1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nc3 a6 and now Carlsen opted for 6 a4, one of White’s rarer choices.
Wei soon equalised, the game was drawn in 36 moves, and Düsseldorf won the match 4.5-3.5, leaving St Pauli close to the relegation spots.
Tata Steel Wijk aan Zee, nicknamed the chess Wimbledon, has its opening ceremony on Friday and its first round on Saturday. Games start at 1pm GMT daily, and can be followed live on major chess sites. Five of the world top eight are competing: Fabiano Caruana (US), Gukesh and Arjun Erigaisi (India), Nodirbek Abdusattorov (Uzbekistan) and Wei. The world’s youngest international master, Argentina’s Faustino Oro, 10, will play in the Challengers.
England’s Matthew Wadsworth is closing on the grandmaster title after achieving his third and final GM norm at Roquetas, Spain, last week. Wadsworth still requires a 2500 Fide rating, but is now only 10 rating points short of his target. The Cambridge economics graduate, 24, who delayed starting a career outside chess to focus on his longstanding ambition, had been close to his third norm at last month’s London Classic but faltered in the final round. Wadsworth’s report on this event for the English Chess Federation’s Chess Moves includes a detailed analysis of his best game there.
At Roquetas he made no mistake, completing nine rounds with an unbeaten 7/9, sharing second prize behind China’s Li Di, and winning in brilliant style in the eighth round against a 2572-rated Armenian.
As often in the past year, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport grant for elite chess, which financed Wadsworth’s entry to Roquetas, delivered a positive result.
3955: 1…e1=Q 2 b8=Q Qxh4+! 3 Kg2 (if 3 Kxh4? Qh6 mate) Qa2+! 4 Kf1 Qa1+! 5 Ke2 (if 5 Kg2? Qah1 mate) Qhe1+ 6 Kd3 Qaxc3 mate.
