We have already published all the games from the Anand-Karpov world chess championship final in Lausanne. What we have today is the edited lowlights.

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The top two players on the current international rating list - Kasparov and Kramnik - may be absent from the world championship, but their understudies have been putting on such a splendid show that they have hardly been missed. We should also remember that with the apparent demise of Kasparov's Professional Chess Association, the Fide (International Chess Federation) world championship is now the only proper competition for the title. After three games of the final, which is now being played in Lausanne, Viswanathan Anand and Anatoly Karpov - ranked third and fourth in the world respectively - are level at 11/2 points each. The first two games, which resulted in one win for each player, were full of excitement.

Michael Adams showed fine defensive skills to save the third game of his world championship semi-final against Viswanathan Anand. In the diagram position, Adams, playing White, was clearly under pressure. The main threat is 1...Rxf2 2.Kxf2 Bd4+.

Michael Adams, for England, and Viswanathan Anand (India) stand level at one-and-a-half points each after three games of the semi-finals of the Fide (International Chess Federation) World Chess Championships in Groningen, in the Netherlands. All three games have been drawn. Anand had the advantage of the white pieces in the final game of the match today.

Ten Thousand pounds a minute is not a bad rate of pay in any sport. For a chess game, however, it is extraordinary. Yet that was the rate at which Michael Adams added to his prize money when he defeated Nigel Short in the quarter-finals of the World Chess Championship in Groningen in the Netherlands on Christmas Day. With this victory, Adams has established himself as England's leading player, nudging Short into second place.

An era ended on Christmas Day when Nigel Short, Britain's leading chess player for the last 10 years, was knocked out of the World Chess Championship by Michael Adams, the heir apparent to the British grandmaster's throne.

Viswanathan Anand has become the first to book his place in the quarter-finals of the world championship with a 2-0 win over Zoltan Almasi. His win in the second game came through a nice finesse in a fashionable opening:

The Investbanka tournament in Belgrade is set for an exciting final round, as all three leaders drew their eighth-round games. Vassily Ivanchuk, Viswanathan Anand and Alexei Shirov now enter the last round neck and neck on 51/2 points.

A reader rang me this week to ask about Hnefatafl. Despite having frequently referred to this euphoniously named game, I have never in fact known the rules. The call prompted me into action, and a search on the Internet brought erudition.

Tying up some of the loose ends from the recent World Team Championship in Lucerne, here are some of the disasters from the event. One man who had a wretched time was the Cuban top board Walter Arencibia, who seemed to become demoralised after an unnecessary loss to Yevgeny Bareyev of Russia in an early round. They reached the diagram position after Arencibia's 31st move as White.

Sting and Steve Davis pit their wits against Garry Kasparov at a celebrity tournament in west London yesterday to promote awareness of the inherited condition, Fragile X syndrome, writes William Hartston.

It is one of the sadder laws of physics that chess columns maintain their shape and size, whatever pressures of length may be exerted by the games they wish to contain. Despite that, we have pleasure in giving highlights of a game of 103 moves that helped decide the European Junior title. Here are the opening moves:

Matthew Macfadyen has won the British Go Championship with three straight victories against Charles Matthews in the final. Go is the ancient board game that is the reason why so few Japanese and Koreans play chess. Simple rules - which dictate that the two players alternately place stones on a board to attempt to surround territory - leads to a game of astonishing complexity in which, at the highest level, intuition plays a greater part than precise calculation. Which is why computers can beat grandmasters at chess, but not at Go.