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wedDINGs and a funeral

Ding (Liren) is very useful for setters, but if he doesn't play again soon he will be the forgotten world champion and too specialist a name for a general cryptic.

... and yet Tree is still synonymous with actor, I suspect for little other reason than the letters are useful

A little chess knowledge required for today’s Genius puzzle… I won’t give the enumeration as special instructions are involved.

Deadly force - Alekhine's opening by chess champion

Guardian 29,268 (Yank)

11 Actress reportedly to bear chess prodigy (6,6)

It's the prodigy one might expect to be cited by this setter. ;-)

Hi Geeker, Happy New Year:-)

I don't know if you saw MC's game against Yu Yangyi in the World Blitz Championship but, if not, it's well worth a look:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBPLw9ANQOA

Also, I was reading on the BBC news website (I think) last week about a Chinese player banned for erm... having beads on him (or should that be in him) - it seems to be on the increase!

@184 - always good to see Carrie:-)

Thanks, Brendan. That was an exceptional blitz game. I don't think MC's concepts would have been extraordinary in a slow time control setting, but remarkable in blitz.

Funny thing...I hadn't seen the game, but as soon as John called out "Here comes a novelty on White's 5th move", I immediately guessed 5. h2-h3. Principle of "most reasonable looking weird move", I'm actually surprised it's a novelty. [Compare the Najdorf Sicilian, probably Black's best chess opening, where (paradoxically) any non-ridiculous 6th move by White , including the trendy 6. h3, is eminently playable. 🤣]

jono@183 FATAL
geeker@184 CARRIE FISHER

Chess champions Tal, Fischer captured the public imagination. Ding scarcely but he has already proved useful for clueing. Kasparov almost a household name but awkward for clueing, similarly Carlsen. Nor would The Times have them as solutions since they are still alive.

Geeker@184 yes, Yank seems to be a new setter. A couple of US literary references, one of which I didn’t know (the relative, a Tom Sawyer reference I think?), which might lead us to think this is an American setter.
Also, I wondered if it is more usual to refer to university as “college” in the US. College=U seemed a bit odd.

Paul@188, yes, FATAL was the answer, though it was enumerated as (6) for reasons too complicated to explain unless you do the puzzle! It did, however, cause me to read up on the Alekhine defence (though that has nothing to do with solving the clue of course!).