My favorite writer Hemingway, in his excellent "Moveable Feast," wrote about starting a day of writing: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." This advice came to my mind as I neared the time to...
Master Files 3.5 Contents Introduction Staying Protected The Importance of a Pawn Break How to Beat a Grandmaster The Twelve Puzzles of Christmas Introduction Hello fellow Chess.com members, and Merry Christmas! As a young child I learned...
Today we will wrap-up the topic of blunders in modern play with three endgame examples from the recent Topalov vs. Laznicka match. The traditional Sachova Corrida Novoborska match, which took place in Prague, featured six games between these two t...
Several weeks ago I played in an excellent tournament organized by Dr. Walter High in North Carolina. The US Masters tournament attracted an extremely strong field with many GMs including Mamedov, Ramirez, Shabalov, & Jankovic - just to name f...
Today we will wrap up the series on how to convert an advantage according to Kramnik. This article is the seventh installment on this topic. Last week I showed you several of my games from the recent World Open, where I had a chance to practice wh...
Chess openings are a bit like fashion - they follow trends. Certain lines become popular and then just fade away. In most cases, an elite player (or most likely his team) prepares an opening for a tournament and then everyone else follows his lead...
Continuing on the topic of Typical Positions in 1.d4 openings, one cannot not mention Nimzo-Indian Defense! This opening is one of the most complex and the resulting positions can be very hard to handle. In my preparation for the US Women's Champi...
Not all openings require knowledge of specific lines; this is especially true for 1.d4 openings. I have been playing 1.d4 for many years now and with minimum energy spent on openings, I manage to get high scores vs like-rated opponents. This is pr...
Today we will review typical positions where one side varied their move order and combined some well-known ideas to reach a new, completely fresh position. When you are familiar with plans and typical ideas, sometimes you don't need to exactl...
Today we will continue with typical plans arising from the Queens Gambit Declined. I had a chance to experience the lack of knowledge in one critical and very popular line last weekend, while playing in the Philadelphia Open. The game ended favora...
Today we start a new series that will show how modern players understand positions through the lenses of typical strategic plans. The series will span 4-5 articles and cover a range of positions. We will learn to differentiate ideas found at the b...
We are wrapping-up the column on Intuition and I would like to take a look at few games from the Candidates Tournament that is currently underway in London. Carlsen and Aronian are two favorites of the tournament and we will analyze their games an...
With the last few articles we studied Magnus Carlsen's comments after the games from the recent London Classic and analyzed the ones that had to do with intuitive approach towards the position. Today I would like to concentrate of some of the posi...
Today's article features a fighting game between Nakamura and Carlsen from the recent London Classic tournament. We will concentrate on few critical moments where intuition played a key role and explore how these two strong players with different ...
Today we continue with the topic of Intuition and will look at few moments from the Adams - Carlsen game at the recent London Chess Classic. The game did not go well for Carlsen, as Adams had the initiative throughout the opening, middlegame and m...
The next several articles will be dedicated to the topic of Intuition. What is intuition in chess? It is a concept, hard to define and there can be endless debates about whether a certain decision is intuitive or not. Nevertheless, it is useful to...
Today we will look at few examples from world champions' practice where one side sacrificed a pawn for positional reasons. In some cases this sacrifice was absolutely necessary, while in the other cases it was optional, even questionable. We will ...
Generally speaking there are two types of chess players: optimists and pessimists. The first tend to stay positive and evaluate positions in their favor, while those in the latter category often give the opponent too much credit and underestimate ...
This article will build on the topic of seeing and correctly assessing key positions which we started studying in the previous article. In last week's article we looked at this concept by analyzing a recent endgame. Today we will see several openi...
A strong chess player calculates variations well but also knows when to stop and evaluate the resulting position, resorting to experience and knowledge of typical positions. An experienced player will know that certain positions are better for him...
Today's article features positions from the recently completed 22nd North American Open that took place in Las Vegas from December 26th-30th. It seems that the holiday atmosphere and the popularity of gambling in Vegas had its impact on the player...
Recently, I had the chance of a lifetime to celebrate chess at the Sundance Festival with the World Chess Hall of Fame and Museum. The museum and Hall of Fame are relocating to St. Louis – a young but already well known chess center in the US. I w...
I remember reading an interview a few years ago with a prominent Russian GM, I don’t remember exactly wether it was Bareev or someone else but what struck me back then was the complaint that Russia does not have enough young talented chess players...
I would like to share with you my recent experience playing in the 2010 US Women’s Championship. One of the most prestigious tournaments of the year took place July 9-20 at the already famous Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis. Along wi...
As a column wrap-up I would like to present a series of positions to solve. I will move from easier examples this week that are aimed at 1200s to harder ones in the next two weeks. In this Final Exam for my column's readers, it is important to tre...
