My guest in the first New In Chess Podcast of 2026 is Peter Svidler. It’s a special moment. Two years ago, Peter was my very first guest in the inaugural episode of the podcast and I am delighted that he’s returning.
Peter can look back on an incredible career as a player and he is one of the most knowledgeable and versatile experts in the world of chess. He is a three-time Candidate for the World Championship, an eight-time champion of Russia, and a World Cup winner. Among his many further successes are five gold team medals at the Olympiad.Over the past years, as he began to play less, Peter has become one of the most popular and loved chess commentators in the world. In fact, it’s fair to say that he was one of the commentators that took chess broadcasts to a new level and did a lot for the professionalization of our game. For all these reasons, Peter is a perfect guest at the start of 2026, as we look ahead to a well-filled chess year that no doubt will bring us many highlights.First175
Velimirovic is a player whose name will always remain immortal in the collective chess memory. But he had a career that was characterized by strange hiccups and odd twists of fate, robbing him of many opportunities.
These book reviews by Matthew Sadler were published in New In Chess magazine 2025#8
I left you on a cliffhanger in the last issue with my finger poised over the ‘order’ button for both volumes of Forgotten Genius – The Life and Games of Grandmaster Dragoljub Velimirovic by Georg Mohr and Ana Velimirovic-Zorica. Well, the story continues happily, as I did order them and loved them both!The book is co-written by the Slovenian player and journalist Georg Mohr and Velimirovic’s daughter Ana. Mohr also co-wrote a volume on Velimirovic’s contemporary Albin Planinc, reviewed in a previous issue. Ana’s involvement adds a special touch to these two volumes. She not only had a large collection of photos and cartoons of her father (many of which appear in both volumes) but also Velimirovic’s175
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