On Wednesday, the Ukrainian GM Stanislav Bogdanovich (@Padenie_Zvezd) and the French GM Marie Sebag (@Etoilegeniale) qualified for the 2019 FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss in Isle of Man.
The two grandmasters each defeated three other men and women who all earned their way to the qualifier with top performances in the four previous Chess.com Titled Tuesday events.
Bogdanovich had won the round-robin portion convincingly, scoring 5/5 after starting with a loss to the runner-up, the Vietnamese...
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 playing the Scotch, what should you do when Black plays Nf6, like Karpov, Kramnik and Aronian? Learn how to handle this solid positional setup in this lesson.
Hi, and welcome to my next blog post. Today, we will consider a question, of a chess player who was suspected of cheating. His Name is Borislav Ivanov.
He mostly played chess in 2012 and 2013. He was beating a lot of strong Grandmasters, and winning big chess events. The Bulgarian Federation however, thought that he was cheating, so they took away his FM title, and they banned him in December 2013.
Zadar Open
He took 4th place in the 2012 Zadar Open which was held in Croatia. He...
Jeffery Xiong defeated Parham Maghsoodloo Thursday by a score of 14.5-10.5 to advance to the finals of the Junior Speed Chess Championship Thursday. "When I lost connection after being a knight up, I wasn't able to recover," said Maghsoodloo. "You have to think about your connection during tournaments like these."
Asked whether he made adjustments between the 5+1 and 3+1 portions, Parham responded: "I was just playing everything and trying to enjoy chess. It wasn't so important to...
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...
