While Maxime Vachier-Lagrave had qualified after the two classical games, Alexander Grischuk, Wesley So and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov also reached the semi-finals of the Riga Grand Prix after yesterday's tiebreaks.
Day six in Riga was an exciting affair with the round two tiebreaks. Unlike in round one, none of the matches went all the way to the Armageddon game to force a decision.
The match between So and Sergey Karjakin was the longest of the round, where the former...
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 sitting at a chessboard, what are players thinking about? Much of their time is spent answering a simple question: "Is this position good or bad?" They might have incredible vision, they might never miss a forcing line... but if at the end of the line they can't answer this question, they will be hopeless as players. They need some way of evaluating positions. They need an evaluation function.
Let's say you give your engine a position, and it gives you a number like +1.50. This number...
On Thursday, Parham Maghsoodloo of Iran plays Jeffery Xiong of the United States in the first semifinal of the Chess.com Junior Speed Chess Championship, sponsored by ChessKid.
Thursday's match winner will play the winner of the other semifinal between Wei Yi and Alireza Firouzja, which is scheduled for July 28 at 8 a.m. PDT (17:00 CEST).
You can watch Parham Maghsoodloo vs. Jeffery Xiong on Thursday, July 18 at 9 a.m. Pacific (18:00 CEST), with expert commentary...
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...
The current U.S. number-three, Leinier Dominguez Perez, has a narrow lead with a 3/4 score after four rounds in the 47th Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting. He is closely followed by three players with 2.5/4: Teimour Radjabov, Radoslaw Wojtaszek and Richard Rapport.
The Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting is a traditional super-tournament held annually in Dortmund, Germany. This year it is an eight-player round robin, filled with an interesting mix of some of the world's...
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...
