A sideline of the Queen’s Gambit Declined is arrived at by 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bg5 c5. This is not the Tarrasch Defense in which Black plays 3...c5. It is sometimes called the Pseudo-Tarrasch. White has options, but no need, to avoid 5.cx...
The tournament at Nottingham in 1936 included fifteen players in a round robin requiring fourteen games. The competitors represented three generations. The standings are: 1-2 Capablanca and Botvinnik 10, 3-4-5 Fine, Reshevsky, Euwe 9.5, 6 Alekhine...
The old World Champion Emanuel Lasker, who was born in 1868, was playing the merely mature Grigory Levenfish, who was born in 1889, at Moscow 1936. This event had 10 players who met in a double round robin. Lasker and Levenfish were playing in the...
Now to make sense out of that title containing the names of four players.Grigory Yakovlev Levenfish was born March 21, 1889 (March 9 at the time in the old calendar) in Piotrkow, Poland in the Russian Empire. He died February 9, 1961 in Moscow, US...
Two of the top grandmasters of the last twenty years met at Biel in 1993 to contest the Meran Variation. Boris Gelfand would win the game and his second interzonal. Viswanathan Anand, the future world champion, would lose, but keep the line as ...
Bent Larsen (pictured) was born March 4, 1935 and died September 9, 2010. He was Champion of Denmark six times from 1954-1964. He was a candidate for the world championship in 1965, 1968, 1971, and 1977. He won the interzonal in 1964, 1967, and 1...
Ernst Gruenfeld was born November 21, 1893 and died April 3, 1962. He was Austria’s top player and one of the world’s best in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1950, when FIDE began awarding titles, he became an international grandmaster.Gruenfeld scored 10...
At Moscow 1935 twenty players engaged in a nineteen round event. At the end, Salo Flohr and Mikhail Botvinnik were on top with 13 points. Flohr was undefeated and had seven wins to Botvinnik’s nine, but Botvinnik had two losses. Emanuel Lasker was...
Emanuel Lasker was born in 1868 and won the World Championship in 1894. He held the title until 1921. He still holds the record as the longest reigning world champion. He stopped playing in tournaments in 1925. After nine years he returned at Zuri...
One of Emanuel Lasker’s farewells to chess was at Moscow 1925. The aging former world champion (1894-1921) would not appear in tournaments for another nine years. The winner at Moscow was Efim Bogoljubow with 13 wins, 5 draws, and 2 losses (15.5/2...
Emanuel Lasker was born December 24, 1868 in Germany and died January 11, 1941 in New York. He was the World Champion for 27 years, from 1894-1921, while also being a mathematician and a philosopher. He dominated chess while champion and competed ...
Alexander Tolush was born May 1, 1910 in St. Petersburg and died March 3, 1969 in the same city, then known as Leningrad. Tolush won the Leningrad Championship four times from 1937-1947. He played in the USSR Championship ten times. His best resul...
The 3rd Remco Heite GM tournament recently was played in Wolvega, The Netherlands. The winners of the previous events, Van Wely in 2006 and Macieja in 2008, participated. There were six players competing in a round robin. The final crosstable show...
Giovanni Portilho Vescovi was born June 14, 1978 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He became an IM in 1993 and a GM in 1998. In 1998, he won a gold medal in the World Junior Team Championship (U-20) playing first board for Brazil. In 2001, he won the Sout...
The tournament at St. Petersburg in 1914 took place in two stages. The results of the first part, the preliminary, was reported at http://www.chess.com/article/view/tarrasch-sacs-two-bishops-and-nimzowitsch . The five players (with their scores) w...
Robert Byrne was born April 20, 1928 in New York City. He won the United States Championship in 1972, won seven medals representing the US nine times in the Olympiads from 1952-1976, played in three Interzonals placing as high as third (1973), and...
Larry Melvyn Evans was born March 23, 1932 in New York, New York and died November 15, 2010 in Reno, Nevada. He won the US Championship in 1951, 1961, 1962, and 1968. In 1980 he was in a three way tie for first, but lost the playoff. Evans was kno...
Siegbert Tarrasch (pictured) was born March 5, 1862 and died February 17, 1934. Around 1890, he was the best or one of the four best players in the world. In 1908, he clearly lost a match for Emanuel Lasker’s world championship (+3 =5 -8). Tarrasc...
Karel Opocensky was born February 7, 1892 in Most, Bohemia and died November 16, 1975 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. My databases show his games from 1912 to 1972. In that long career, Opocensky won the championship of Czechoslovakia four times in 192...
The Nimzo-Indian is considered a solid positional defense. However, the soundness of an opening is often tested by tactical problems. The line presented includes the offer of a piece by White. This has been played in only a few games. Black has b...
Luke McShane (pictured younger) was born January 7, 1984. He won the World Under-10 Championship while only eight years old. At sixteen he became the youngest ever British grandmaster. His record stood until David Howell broke it in 2007. He won ...
In the recent Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, Judit Polgar played in the Men’s Olympiad. The Women’s Olympiad is for women only. The Men’s Olympiad is not limited to men and is now called the Open Olympiad when you can find that term used. J...
Janis Klovans was born April 9, 1935 and died October 5, 2010. He was Latvia’s champion nine times from 1954 to 1986. He competed in the Soviet Championship a number of times. In 1997, 1999, and 2001 he won the World Senior Championship. In 1976,...
Viktor Lvovich Korchnoi was born March 23, 1931, in Leningrad, USSR. He defected (the old word for escaping from the Soviets) to the Netherlands. Later, he moved (what a free person does) to Switzerland. In 1974, he lost the Candidates final to Ka...