Introduction Why shouldn’t we play chess? It’s a question I sometimes think about. As an increasingly reluctant chess player, I have to concede that the game is interesting and challenging. It’s an inexpensive hobby if your a...
Introduction As I often repeat, as a not-so-comforting mantra after tilts and blunders, chess is just a board game. Its greatness comes confined by just 64 squares, caged by incessant rules (what is en passant, anyway?) and each piece doomed t...
Introduction You sit down at the chessboard. But who is seated across from you? From the days of fraudulent automatons, concealing sly masters rudely crammed in claustrophobic boxes, chess players work to distinguish human and inhuman op...
Introduction Steam billowed from my ears, streams of nonsense calculations stumbled through my brain. An enticing knight move lit up my eyes and my trembling hand hovered over the mouse. A bead of sweat dripped down my forehead — survival ...
Introduction Recently, I learned something about chess (not to brag, of course) — that it can sometimes be truly fun and rewarding. This notion began to corrupt my mind after my friends dragged me out of retirement to an OTB blitz tourname...
Introduction Endgames are often seen as the culmination of strategy, where meticulous planning throughout the game finally pays its dividends and delivers the victor a hard-earned point. However, sometimes a chess player can do everything right ...
Introduction It's a beautiful day to play chess. I start off with 1. e4 and my opponent responds with 1...e5. I continue with 2. Nf3, but just a few turns later my opponent plays the annoying ...Bg4, pinning the knight on f3. When I see such a...
Introduction Geza Maroczy left a strange legacy: the discovery that certain pawn formations can impose a near decisive cramp on one's opponent. - Bobby Fischer In 1904, a German chess master named Rudolf Swiderski played an interesting pawn...
Saddeningly, this summer was going to mark the one-year anniversary of the last time I played in an OTB tournament. I’d been playing a lot of online games in that timeframe, so it made sense to make a return to OTB. Here’s how that con...
Many chess players struggle to find free yet high-quality opening resources. If you've reached a point where the ten-minute YouTube videos leave you hungry for more, read on. In this blog, I'll share an underappreciated resource for learning chess...
