The European Club Cup became a "Petersburg Tale" as Mednyi Vsadnik defeated Sjakklub Valerenga and then edged out AVE Novy Bor on tiebreak. Cercle d'Echecs de Monte-Carlo won the women's section.
The European Club Cup only lasts seven rounds, but it was still one round too many for Magnus Carlsen's Valerenga. Their successful run finished in a big anticlimax as the two heros of the previous two matches were the ones who lost their games in the match with the eventual tournament...
The Irish Sea will play host once again to the top-flight open event Chess.com Isle of Man International from October 20-28. This year's edition will be the strongest open tournament ever held.
While the top four players in the world have decided to skip the turboprop flight, numbers 5-11 are all there along with about 170 other masters for this fifth edition. Headlining this year will be a field normally worthy of an elite round-robin event: Anish Giri, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Vladimir Kramnik,...
HOW TO START OUT
I get many, many players (rated 800 to 1200) asking me what their style is, why do they lose when they had a better game, are their opponents cheating, how to get good fast, or simply how to get a higher rating.
All these players think these questions are something that only they go through, but the truth is that most suffer through the same things as the others. Apparently they think that there is a quick fix that I can give them. Alas, there is no such thing. You have...
Does Fabiano Caruana stand a chance against the legendary Magnus Carlsen in their 2018 world championship match? If anyone would know, it's Caruana's former manager, IM Lawrence Trent.
Learn how Caruana could use his awesome middlegame technique to beat the world champion.
With the upcoming world chess championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana there is an increased interest in the two contenders. Alexander Kalinin recently published the book Fabiano Caruana – His Amazing Story and His Most Instructive Chess Games. This book originally appeared in Russian Fabiano Caruana. Шахматные уроки (Russian Chess House) but has now been made available to a broader audience in a updated release by New In Chess. You can download a sample...
Magnus Carlsen avoided losing to Ding Liren and dropping to number two in the world rankings, and then saw his team Valerenga grab sole lead at the European Club Cup as Nils Grandelius became the match winner.
It was an eventful day for the world champion. After missing a tactic, he was looking at a lost endgame vs Ding, and was almost certain of playing next month's world championship match as world number-two.
But things ended well for Carlsen, who managed to save the game and his rating,...
Looking for a great way to kick off your school's chess club in the fall? The Fourth "Hour of Chess Week" is the first time we will host the event outside of the spring!
This back-to-school edition still gives you a chance to win 500 gold memberships for your entire school, which is valued at $5,000 USD!
Once again, we will dedicate one full week to encouraging chess in schools (in every school) for at least one hour. We're borrowing from the KhanAcademy playbook (a website and organization...
It took 16 years after Sergey Karjakin became a grandmaster at 12 years old for another person to earn the highest title in chess before turning 13.
But now, four months after Indian prodigy Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa became the second 12-year-old in history to become a grandmaster, a third pre-teen GM has likely appeared. Although not official, IM Javokhir Sindarov of Tashkent, Uzbekistan seems to have earned his third and final norm at the most recent edition of the First Saturday...
Petrov's Defense is not a common opening in club tournaments. It almost doesn't exist in scholastic tournaments, either.
The reason is the opening is not very exciting, and in most lines leads to slow, positional play. Therefore, as Wikipedia puts it: "The Petrov has a reputation of being dull and uninspired."
If White manages to win, it usually happens after a long positional grind, like the next game:
Short, decisive games are uncommon in Petrov's Defense. Nevertheless, I have noticed a...
