6 Pep Talk
Magnus Carlsen meets Pep Guardiola.

8 Contributors
Who are the new columnists Nate Solon and Christof Sielecki?

9 Editorial
The year of the 40th anniversary of New In Chess magazine.

12 NIC’s Café
The chess of Franz Beckenbauer, the shoes of Anna-Maja Kazarian and Magnus Carlsen’s 10 million dollars.

14 Tata Steel Chess
Few pundits had counted on Wei Yi as a potential winner of ‘the Wimbledon of Chess’. But after a slow start, he scored a formidable 4½ out of 5 and then showed nerves of steel in the tiebreak.

17 Celeb 64
Napoleon Bonaparte.

27 Fair & Square
Hikaru Nakamura: ‘In chess, you can be an oddball and still be accepted.’

38 Interview Wei Yi
Not the World Champions Ding Liren and Ju Wenjun, but the third Chinese ace, 24-year-old former prodigy Wei Yi, stole the show.

48 Carlsen wins two World Titles
Magnus Carlsen repeated the double and won his 16th and 17th World Chess Championships in Uzbekistan in the last days of 2023.

66 Somehow, I became Korchnoi
Paul van der Sterren played the best game of his life in Wijk aan Zee in 1978, effortlessly defeating Viktor Korchnoi. In his new book, Mindful Chess, he explains what happened.

70 Odds chess
Odds chess was widely popular in the 19th century, but is rare now. Both Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer loved odds chess. Grandmaster Larry Kaufman explains how you can play odds and everything else you need to know about this chess variant.

78 Opinion
In this new column the founders of the Women in Chess Foundation argue how the chess world can embrace inclusivity.

80 James Altucher
Think like an eight-year-old.

82 How to Improve
Nate Solon offers a framework how to review your game.

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

86 The Scoresheet
In this new column, Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam tells the story of Alexander Alekhine’s scoresheet of his game against Emanuel Lasker, Zurich 1934.

88 The Model Game
In this new column, Christof Sielecki picks a Model Game, starting with a Benoni structure.

92 Sadler on Books
There are many wonderful chess books that instruct you, inspire you with unexpected new ideas or make you think about chess strategy in a fresh way. However, there is also a very rare type of writing that essentially puts a mirror in front of your soul as you read it.

98 Jan Timman
Gukesh and Firouzja were the last players to qualify for the Candidates tournament in Toronto. The routes they followed, did raise eyebrows. Jan Timman argues that FIDE should draw clear conclusions.

106 Just Checking
Russ Makofsky is one of the founders of The Gift of Chess.