NM Jeremy Kane is the Instructional Content Manager for Chess.com, and the author of several courses in the Starting Out series, Queen’s Gambit Accepted, Trompowsky, and Tarrasch.
GM Magnus Carlsen recently claimed that the Wayward Queen Attack, better known as the Scholar's Mate, is the best opening for beginners. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Chess.com (@wwwchesscom) ...
GM Ben Finegold is well known for his chess rules to live by, most famously, "never play f6." A black pawn almost never belongs on f6. It's dangerous for the black king and makes it hard to move other pieces on the kingside. Finegold teaching ...
Quantity has a quality all its own —Thomas A. Callaghan Jr In 2019, GM Hikaru Nakamura was over the hill. He was 32 years old and had gradually dropped nearly 70 points from his rating peak four years earlier, falling from number two...
Four players will compete in the Speed Chess Championship Finals on February 7 and 8, 2026, in London, England. GM Magnus Carlsen will aim to defend his title against five-time SCC Champion Hikaru Nakamura, last year's finalist GM Alireza Firouzja...
They say that chess is the game of kings, an honorable pastime for people who want to lose themselves in thought. Bullet chess, however, played at a pace of one minute per side for the whole game, is anything but honorable. Bullet isn't a game of ...
FIDE recently announced that GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu has accrued enough points to win the 2025 FIDE circuit and earn a spot in the 2026 FIDE Candidates Tournament, the final step of the world championship qualification cycle. With Praggnanand...
Chess literature is full of amazing games by grandmasters. Yet, there are tens of millions of games played around the world every day, the vast majority of them by untitled players. On average, a grandmaster game will be higher quality, but the co...
Have you ever blundered into a stalemate when you were winning a game? It happens to everyone. IM Eric Rosen has famously saved lost positions against several strong opponents with the same sneaky stalemate trap. Often stalemates stem from...
The 2025 Chess World Cup is scheduled to begin on October 30 in Goa, India. Two hundred and six of the best players in the world will compete in a knockout event, with the top 50 seeds receiving a first-round bye. This will be the 11th edition of ...
"Cramped positions carry within them the germ of defeat." – Siegbert Tarrasch This spring, two of the strongest chess engines in the world, Stockfish and Torch, played a match featuring some bizarre starting positions. We asked the Chess.c...
Most chess players have a favorite opening trap, a trick they use to win many quick games. At the highest level, these tricks have to be quite sophisticated to catch experienced opponents, but when you're new to chess, many opening traps can rake ...
If you're looking to get better at chess, the material on Chessable and the equivalent Chess.com Courses are some of the best educational resources you can find. Chessable is well-known for its huge variety of opening courses, but its endgame cont...
Becoming a stronger player is about finding ways to turn knowledge into skill. - GM Tiger Hillarp Persson in Tiger's Chaos Theory. When you're new to chess, improvement is relatively easy. Most of us lose our first few games, and then start...
For anyone serious about chess improvement, Chessable is the premier place to learn the game. Chessable has hundreds of courses for all levels, from beginner to Lifetime Repertoires that even grandmasters study. With so much content, it can be tri...
Have you ever played a brilliant move in one of your games? How about more than one? They're hard to find, so it's difficult to score several in a game. However, there's one tactical trick that's likely to let you stack up multiple brilliant moves...
"There is luck in chess. My opponent was lucky that he was playing against an idiot." - Jim Loy Last week, many of us watched the exciting Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Las Vegas tournament. The gambling capital of the world might seem li...
“There is no concrete preparation, the way it is in normal chess when you can memorize 20 moves and it's hard to even get a game—in this format, you always get a game!" - Magnus Carlsen, February 9, 2024. Have you tried F...
Have you ever lost a chess game in one move? Probably not. Unless you're playing provocatively, you're unlikely to lose material or get mated early on in standard chess. However, in Freestyle Chess (Chess 960), even master-level players have resig...
In normal chess, White has a small advantage in the opening at the start of every game. Because White can move first, engines like Stockfish give White an edge of about 0.25, an advantage, but well within the drawing margin. However, in Freestyle ...
Maybe you've heard of Freestyle Chess, where you shuffle the pieces before a game to create wild starting positions. We decided to test some more extreme setups: Are two rooks better than a queen? How about six rooks against three queens? Theory d...
Did you see Magnus Carlsen's dramatic outburst against world champion Gukesh Dommaraju? A seething Magnus Carlsen slammed his fist into a table after suffering his first defeat to world champion Gukesh Dommaraju in a classical game https://t.c...
In the Chess.com Classic tournament in May, GM Hikaru Nakamura, one of the best players in the world, resigned in a winning position against GM Magnus Carlsen! Watch and listen how shocked commentators GM Aman Hambleton and IM Levy Rozman are as t...
What's in a name? Have you seen this famous clip of GM Hikaru Nakamura calculating a deep combination in seconds with his famous "check, check, check...." How can Hikaru calculate that quickly? He's amazing, but it helped that he knew the s...
Former world champion GM Magnus Carlsen recently lamented that it's "kind of sad to see how far you have to go to get a game, that you cannot really play the best lines anymore." Chess engines have demonstrated that all mainstream openings, and ev...
Figuring out your preferred "time control," how long each player has to move, is the first step toward playing a chess game. Each time control leads to slightly different decision-making processes for the players and affects how the game will like...
