Chess.com's new game called "Puzzle Rush" is taking the chess community by storm! If you haven't tried it yet, you should. But be warned, the game is very addictive. While I doubt we will ever see "Puzzle Rush Anonymous," nevertheless, once y...
The world championship match is over and now it is a part of chess history. Just like any big chess event, it has provided a lot of food for thought. For many chess fans the main takeaway from the match is that something should be changed so we ...
We all make mistakes playing chess, proving the old saying "to err is human."' However, it is one thing to miss a 30-move-deep variation like Fabiano Caruana did in game six of his world championship match. It's a totally different story wh...
In one of my first tournament games I fell into a well-known opening trap and lost very quickly. My very considerate opponent waited till the mandatory crying was over and came to me. "Don't be upset, Greg", he said. "The move I played in the op...
When I was a kid, I didn't watch much TV. You see, 40 years ago we had only two state-controlled TV channels in the Soviet Union, so most of the kids spent their time outdoors rather than watching boring news. Nevertheless, there was one weekly pr...
One of the leading Russian newspapers, "Izvestia," has published an interview with the president of the Russian Chess Federation and captain of the Russian Olympic team, Andrey Filatov. This interview got my attention when Filatov claimed tha...
The last European Chess Club Championship was a nightmare tournament for Peter Svidler. I don't recall another case of an elite grandmaster losing four games in a row against mostly lower-rated opponents! Only in the last round we could fin...
The year was 1985 and I was playing a tournament where I had an opportunity to get my first master norm. At that time, tournaments with master norms were very scarce in the Soviet Union. In fact, we had only one such tournament per year in my ho...
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 pu...
I love reading member comments to my articles! It is a pleasure to see how smart and intelligent our chess community is. Unlike commenters in many internet forums, Chess.com members are polite and helpful. Take for example one of my most re...
The regular readers of my column know that I hate political correctness. In my old article I explained it is probably the biggest threat to Western civilization. Very soon people will stop expressing their true beliefs out of fear that the...
I think it was GM Tartakower who once said "the wise chess player learns from someone else’s mistakes, the smart one learns from his own mistakes, and the stupid chess players never learn." So, let's be wise and learn from the games of th...
Chess openings have been analyzed for centuries and yet even today it is still not easy to identify the best and worst first moves. According to Fischer, 1.e4 is "best by test." From the other side, when the famous theoretician GM Ernst Gruenfel...
Chess aficionados love to debate about the best chess player of all time. As I mentioned in my old article, this is the question that has no answer. Indeed, it is very difficult to guess who would have won the world championship match Fisc...
One of the leading characters of the Soviet romantic comedy "Where is the Nophelet?" would ask attractive women a very cryptic question. Yet the pick-up line "Do you know where the Nophelet is?" worked like a charm, since everyone wanted to k...
Everyone knows the story about the Trojan Horse that helped the Greek army win the Trojan War. Since chess is a model of a war on 64 squares, can't we use this 3,000-year-old trick on the chessboard? Just think of it: Your opponent hides his ki...
On March 24, 1937, the leading Soviet chess magazine 64 published a theoretical article about a new opening system the magazine called the "Panov Defense." I challenge you to identify the moves of this opening line. Yes, you can Google it ...
Let me start with a disclaimer. While the title sounds sinister, I can assure you that no frog or any other animal was hurt for the sake of this article. It is just a metaphor! This is how Daniel Quinn describes it in "The Story Of B": If you ...
In last week's article, we discussed chess players' behavior. The big questions were if trying to flag your opponent in a dead-drawn position or playing out a completely lost position or some other perfectly legal things are ethical. Judgin...
A well-known saying states that all is fair in love and war. Our beloved game is actually both love and war. While it is pretty obvious that chess is a war on 64 squares, what about love? Well, check the Twitter hashtag #WhyILoveChess and...
Some 20 years ago I had a conversation with a grandmaster who grew up in a bad neighborhood. He was recollecting his youth years when street fighting was pretty common. I don't remember much from his stories, but one of his phrases has stu...
The coming world championship match is going to be Magnus Carlsen's biggest challenge since he won his crown. As I mentioned in my recent article, it is the first time he will defend his title against a younger challenger, the 25-year-old Americ...
At the very end of my article about MVL's trapped rooks, I mentioned that Tal was famous for his queen play. There was even a joke that a regular queen is worth nine pawns and Tal's queen is worth 12 pawns! The Chess.com member "fiercebadge...
Some chess tactical ideas are very common. For example, I cannot imagine any experienced chess player who never had back-rank problems in his games. Interference is pretty much at the opposite end of chess spectrum. Here is how Wikipedia describ...
I really appreciate my readers' feedback and therefore always read your comments to my articles. One of them, by the Chess.com member rossmckinley1224, made me think. Ross wrote: "For those of us struggling to achieve a 1000 rating on Ches...