Pal Benko was born July 14, 1928 in Amiens, France to Hungarian parents and raised in Hungary. Benko won the Hungarian Championship in 1948. In 1957, after playing board 1 for Hungary in the World Student Team Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland, B...
Andras Adorjan was born March 31, 1950. He was a candidate for the world championship. He has written chess books, including four with "Black is OK" in the title. His opponent in this game is Zoltan Ribli, who was born September 6, 1951 and who al...
Leonid Stein was born near Lvov, Ukraine, then in the Soviet Union, on Nov. 12, 1934 and died July 4, 1973. At the time, Stein was a world class player. He won the Soviet Armed Forces Championship in 1955. He became a master as a result of his 3rd...
Siegbert Tarrasch was born March 5, 1862 and died February 17, 1934. He was one of the best players of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Around 1890, he may have been the best. World Champion Wilhelm Steinitz offered him the opportunity to p...
Tony Miles (April 23, 1955-November 12, 2001) became the first over-the-board grandmaster born in the United Kingdom in 1976. His best results were in the 1970s and 1980s. He was able to win games against several former world champions. His most f...
This game is about one line of the Queen's Indian Defense. White is Garry Kasparov. He was born April 13, 1963 in Baku, Azerbaijan. He won the world championship in 1985 from Anatoly Karpov. He was FIDE champion until 1993 when he split with FIDE....
Samuel Reshevsky was born in Russian ruled Poland Nov. 26, 1911 and died in New York April 4, 1992. After learning to play at age four, Reshevsky was a celebrated prodigy who gave simultaneous exhibitions at the age of eight. His family came to th...
Frank Marshall (1877-1944) won the U.S. championship in 1904, but refused the title because Harry Pillsbury was unable to play. In 1907, Marshall lost a world title match against the champion, Emanuel Lasker. Marshall became the U.S. champion in 1...
The Caro Kann Defense is a suitable answer to 1.e4. It can lead to positional and tactical games. In this game I was playing the black pieces. White was Roy Mallett, who was a master in that era. When answering 1.e4, he played the French Defense, ...
Mikhail Botvinnik (1911-1995) was the Soviet champion numerous times and world champion most of the years from 1948-1963. One of the openings he was well known for playing was the Caro Kann Defense. With the white pieces, he pioneered the 6.Bg5 li...
William Lombardy was born December 4, 1937. He won the New York State Championship in 1954. He won the Canadian Open in 1956. Lombardy became the first American to win the World Junior Championship in 1957. That event held in Toronto, meant the un...
The Scotch Game has been played for many years. The first world champion, Wilhelm Steinitz (1836-1900), played the move 4...Qh4. The same Steinitz who developed the concepts of positional play, brought his queen out early. Today, due to specific l...
Mikhail Botvinnik (1911-1995) was the Soviet Champion many times between 1931 and 1952. He held the World Championship in the years 1948-1957, 1958-1960, and 1961-1963. Playing against the Caro-Kann Defense in this game, Botvinnik used the Panov A...
I have been plannng for weeks to show the game IM David Pruess won against GM Jesse Kraai this year in Berkeley. Yesterday and today, the news on this site indicates that David Pruess has been hired to work here. This game is an example of his abi...
Boris Spassky was born in Leningrad, which once again is St. Petersburg, January 30, 1937. He won the Soviet Championship four times from 1956 to 1973. He was a candidate for the world championship seven times from 1956 to 1985. He defeated Keres,...
Nigel Short was born June 1, 1965 and qualified for the British Championship three day before his twelfth birthday. He was second only to Kasparov, who was two years older, in the World Junior Championship in 1980. He became a grandmaster in 1984....
Edward Lasker (1885-1981) has already been introduced in a previous article. His opponent in this game is Abraham Kupchik (1892-1970). Kupchik was born in Brest in the Russian Empire. In 1903, his family came to America where he became an accounta...
Edward Lasker (1885-1981) was born in Germany (in an area now in Poland). He became an engineer and moved to London, England where he played his famous casual game against Sir George Thomas. Before war began in 1914, he moved to America. He won th...
Helmut Pfleger was born June 8, 1943 in Czechoslovakia. He was a world class junior player by 1960. He tied for first in the West German Championship in 1963 and 1965. He became a grandmaster in 1975. He practices internal medicine and psychothera...
The famous Adolf Anderssen - Lionel Kieseritzky , London 1851 game is know as the "Immortal Game." Anderssen sacrificed two rooks and the queen to produce a mate with two knights and a bishop. Other games have been dubbed "immortal" by chess write...
The Classical Defense to the Ruy Lopez uses 3...Bc5. This idea has been played for hundreds of years with the aim of obtaining active piece play. White can use the position of the bishop on c5 to play c3 and d4, which gains a tempo in the struggle...
The Classical Defense to the Ruy Lopez is also called the Cordel Defense because Oskar Cordel was a player who used this system. The idea of the Cordel Defense is to play 3...Bc5 which is more active than Be7. White is invited by the position of t...
Geza Maroczy (1870-1951) was one of the best players in the world and Hungary's top player in the early 20th century. He was awarded the grandmaster title by FIDE based on past performance in 1950. He was skilled in all phases of the game, not jus...
Salomon Flohr (1908-1983) was born in a part of Poland that later belonged to Ukraine. His parents were killed in a World War I massacre. He and his brother escaped to Czechoslovakia , which had become independent of Austria-Hungary. By the late t...
