On Tuesday, Jeffery Xiong of the USA plays Benjamin Gledura of Hungary in the fourth and last match of the quarterfinals of the Chess.com Junior Speed Chess Championship, sponsored by ChessKid.
The winner of Tuesday's match will face Parham Maghsoodloo in the semifinal on July 18 at 9 a.m. PDT (18:00 CEST).
You can watch Jeffery Xiong vs. Benjamin Gledura on Tuesday, July 16 at 11 a.m. Pacific (20:00 CEST), with commentary by IM Danny Rensch and special guest commentator,...
There is a well-known chess joke (or maybe not even a joke!) that it is much more difficult to sacrifice a pawn than a queen.
Indeed, in most queen sacrifices you get huge dividends right away, since it is difficult to imagine a player sacrificing his queen just to get (for example) a good square for his knight. Therefore, it is relatively easy to predict the outcome of many queen sacrifices, like the next one:
From the other side, most pawn sacrifices are done for positional gains and so it...
When you play 1. d4 in Bullet and Blitz you're sure to see a lot of 1...e5?. Some people of course just play it as a premove. However, the majority try to make you waste a lot of time and beat you in their pet line.
In fact, 1...e5? leads not to a single gambit, but a complex of at least three different types of tries, following the critical and obvious 2. dxe5 or 2. dxe5 Nc6 3. Nf3.
These can be categorized depending on whether Black plays for fast development (...d6 &...
Round two of the FIDE Grand Prix cycle started on Monday in Riga, Latvia and had only one winner: Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. This is the second Grand Prix tournament, following the Moscow Grand Prix. Only eight players remain in this knockout event after round one needed six matches to be decided in tiebreaks.
Topalov vs Vachier-Lagrave was the game of the round. | Photo: Niki Riga/World Chess
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave hadn't won a classical game in 21 games before Riga, but today he won...
This month we are pleased to meet Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, known as MVL, the French number 1 and member of world top 5.
Chess.com France will follow closely his quest for the world title that will require being qualified for the next Candidates tournament. Thus, the next Grand Prix will be crucial. That's why we will watch it carefully on our channel. Jurmala Grand Prix (a seaside resort near Riga in Latvia) will take place from July 12 to 25, and our pair Vlad Tkachiev and Kevin Bordi will comment...
Group C of the PRO Chess League Summer Series could not have had a more dramatic start. In a group with three PRO Chess League playoff teams, tensions were high on Saturday, as the Armenia Eagles, Moscow Wizards, Mumbai Movers, and Sao Paulo Capybaras each looked to make a strong opening statement.
Tajikistan's only grandmaster, Farrukh Amonatov, entered the Summer Series as a relative unknown among PRO Chess League fans, but led the Mumbai Movers to five points. Even with a...
What is pawn structure?
From my online glossary, I define it as “the positioning of the whole pawn mass. Also referred to as the pawn skeleton. This positioning of the pawns is what usually dictates the types of plans available in a given position due to open files, space, pawn weaknesses, etc.”
In my previous article (Learning Basic Pawn Structures), I showed how important (and fairly easy) it is to use pawns. Here I will give you structures that are more complex. However, whether...
