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,...
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,...
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...
Magnus Carlsen might be the best chess player to ever live, so how could anyone possibly beat him?
FM Mike Klein shows you the ways that the challenger, Fabiano Caruana, could defeat Carlsen and become the next world chess champion.
In a previous blog post we were looking at knight sacrifices on g7. The most famous of such sacrifices occurred in one of Mikhail Tal's games and there is a famous "hippo story" that is connected with it.
The story is so famous that it even made it to the Wikipedia article about Mikhail Tal, quoted from his own book "The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal":
I will never forget my game with GM Vasiukov in USSR Championship. We reached a very complicated position where I was intending...
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...
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...
Three weeks before the start of the FIDE world championship, organizer World Chess launched chess dating app Mates. Billed as a way to find an opponent for a game of chess, the app came with a press release that doesn't shy away from a sexual connotation.
Available both for iOS and Android, the app uses dating technology to help find "a chess playing partner near you." Users post a selfie to create a profile that remains online for just one hour. If there's a "match," they can agree on a location...
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...
