The event was the first US Junior Closed Invitational Championship in 1966. The top eight junior players in the US are invited to play a round robin. It's the final round and things are tense among the young masters. Walter Browne of Brooklyn has ...
Donald Byrne is best known for losing The Game of the Century in the 1956 Rosenwald tournament to Bobby Fischer. This is great because it ensures him a type of immortality. It's also not so great since Donald Byrne was one of the great chess perso...
Example 1: If White captures on e5 on the fourth move in the game below, which piece should he use to capture first? (The start of the blog may seem too easy, but it's to make a point, so stick with me and see what you might learn...) Of cours...
As many readers might be aware, I started tournament play at age 16 as a really terrible player. It was not until my fourth tournament, after 8 months of play, that I won more than one game in an event. However, once I learned how to play "Real Ch...
As a little background, my first book Elements of Positional Evaluation, was written (with my typewriter!) in 1974 but not published til 1990. One of the reasons it was initially rejected was that a GM, who represented a chess publishing house, do...
One of the most common errors I encounter, even among experienced players, is playing fast when the opponent is in time pressure (and you are not). It's very tempting to do so, and there are some advantages to playing quickly in those situations b...
The seventh and final round was the only game on Sunday, so I had an entire day to prepare. I had a half point lead; a draw would clinch a tie for the title and a win, of course, made me the outright champion on my first attempt. My opponent was...
With the possible exception of Round 1 and a little bit of Round 2, all of the previous games were fairly unbalanced and all, without exception, were decisive. This changed in Round 6 when I got a nice opening advantage against Joe Weber, and cou...
The first four games of this round-robin event were played on the previous weekend, and July 14-15, 1973 were the dates for the final three. My first opponent on the second weekend was Harvey Bradlow, an old friend/nemesis from our junior days (a...
Compared to some of the other veterans at the Germantown Chess Club, Lou Golder had not been one of my frequent opponents. Possibly I had played a loss against him when I was weaker and a draw after I got stronger. In any case, I really did not kn...
Michael Pastor was the young superstar of Philadelphia chess. Bright and chess-obsessed, Michael made master by his mid-teens, a feat quite less common than today. Not only that, but simultaneously I had been in one of my frequent "vacations" from...
[This is the second in a series of 7 blogs about the 1973 Greater Philadephia Invitational Championship - link for Part 1] When I first started playing tournament chess in the late 1960's and early 1970's, "Master" was a very difficult title to a...
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Greater Philadelphia Invitational Chess Championship. In honor of this event I thought I would write a 7-part series with light annotation of my game in each round. Each blog will primarily consist ...
I often get asked various questions about how to play the middlegame, and I think playing many long-time control games slowly against good opposition and then carefully reviewing those games afterwards is the best way to learn about pretty much an...
There are lots of things an instructor can do during a lesson to help a student, such as reviewing games, answering questions, or having the student do "indicative" puzzles. But I also include three types of exercises which I periodically rot...
The grandaddy of all opening principles is "Move every piece once before you move every piece twice unless there is a tactic." In his venerable book Common Sense in Chess, World Champion Emanuel Lasker's rules for development of the pieces #2 is "...
The time was late 1968. I was 18, and I had just had a couple of strong tournaments that had gotten my rating close to the USCF's "Top 25 Juniors" list for the US. In those days the ratings were lower than they are now and there were fewer juniors...
I think the rating system is terrific, but it's so accurate that often players fall in love with it, rather than worry about their playing strength. I seen numerous games where a lower rated player was winning easily and offered a draw "...because...
Over the years I have created a few quizzes, some serious, and some less so. Almost, but not all, exist via my Chess Cafe column Novice Nook. I thought it might be helpful to create a short "quiz guide" in one place: A Tactics Quiz - This is a t...
When the prestigious firm Everyman Chess agreed to publish my proposed book "A Guide to Chess Improvement", based on my Chess Cafe column on ... you guessed it ... how to improve your chess, I would finally be able to answer positively to those th...
My 11th book, "The World's Most Instructive Amateur Game Book", is about ready to arrive at the publisher, Mongoose Press (www.mongoosepress.com). You can order via that website, or the book will be available most everywhere soon (now at Amazon: h...
A few months ago I wrote a blog "Danisms" (http://blog.chess.com/danheisman/danisms), about chess terms I have created to better explain how players learn, think, and play chess. In addition to these terms, I have also made up a few "principles/he...
I guess after writing a blog Classical Development (http://blog.chess.com/danheisman/classical-development) I felt a little obligated to write one on Hypermodern Development, even though that was not the original intention. The easy definition o...
"Move every piece once before you move any piece twice, unless there is a tactic" is the grandaddy of all opening principles. But it's certainly not the only thing you need to know about openings (to say the least). One piece of opening knowledge ...
