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The first round of any Swiss tournament matches the top half of the field against the bottom and, as a result, there are many unequal pairings. If chess ratings were set in stone the result should really be 1-0 all the way down to the midpoint but... | Read More
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Zugzwang, that dreaded compulsion to move when your position is so stretched that anything you do will weaken it, can be a chess player's nightmare, but there are occasions when it poses no problem at all.
In it's most elementary form, zugzwang ... | Read More
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The people of the Western nations are growing fat. Ask anybody! Look at any news source and you'll learn that there is an obesity epidemic that threatens the health and beauty of an entire generation. As a consequence we are being besieged by diet... | Read More
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Long, long ago at the North Pole, Santa's stress level was going off the Richter scale.
A virus had laid low the elves, production was way behind and, horror of horrors, Mrs Claus's mother had arrived for a surprise visit.
Three of the reindeer ... | Read More
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Bullies aren't very admirable people. They're often thought to be cowardly but that's not necessarily so—sometimes they're great hulking brutes who fear nobody. On the other hand, there are others who only strut their stuff when they have their ... | Read More
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Mikhail Tal was, at his peak, an irresistible force. World champions past, present and future—including Smyslov, Botvinnik, Petrosian, Spassky and Fischer—fell to the wizardry of combinations which may sometimes have been unsound but were ext... | Read More
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No, this isn't a story about Alexandra Kosteniuk (pictured) or even Arianne Caoili, the femme fatale behind Gormallygate. It's about queens, and the part they play in the royal game. Sometimes there can be too many queens on the board, sometimes ... | Read More
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She-Who-Flies-by-Night is known well beyond the boundaries of chess.com and is one of the most respected contributors in the chess firmament, so when she makes a request it carries the authority of a royal command. A few days ago she asked me to ... | Read More
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The nineteenth century was an age of spectacular sacrifices and flamboyant gambits that resulted in the kind of wild games that we rarely see in modern practice. Following are two king chases from the glory days, one from modern tournament play,... | Read More
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Kasparov, commenting on Euwe's game against Speyer in the 1924 Dutch Championship, wrote, “This is ... a classic ambush with the threat of discovered check.”
The concept of an ambush hadn't occurred to me before but I didn't need to read it t... | Read More