The recent departure of IM Emory Tate is a severe blow to American chess. While we have many chess players who are stronger than him and a huge number of chess players who are weaker than him, we'll never have another Emory Tate. In this article...
I run a chess club in a local school, and whenever I ask my students if a king can check another king, I hear a loud "No! Kings cannot kiss each other!" Of course, I know what they mean. Even beginners are well aware that this is the closest a k...
In the first part of this article I demonstrated by my own example that the biggest secret of the Soviet school of chess was the utmost motivation of the Soviet players. We simply had no right to do wrong since the consequence could be ...
The famed Soviet school of chess has produced hundreds of grandmasters and dozens of world champions. Thousands of chess coaches teach their students using "the Soviet training method." But who can really describe what exactly was/is the So...
If you follow my weekly column, then you probably noticed that I am a big fan of Magnus Carlsen. I like his chess style, his general attitude to play till the very end and his notorious disregard of the opening theory. I grew up at the height...
"Thank you, GM Serper for this profound statement. I would have never guessed it on my own!" Admit this was your first thought when you read the title of this article. Yes, chess is obviously not checkers and yet, when I was a kid, I heard this ...
Sometimes we can observe a peculiar situation in chess: one of the pieces on the board practically doesn't exist. Yes, it is there: we can see it, we can feel it, but we cannot move it. Therefore, in most of the cases, for a practical purpose su...
I am not going to reveal a big secret if I say that the vast majority of chess players love tactical play and hate slow maneuvering. Indeed, tactics are beautiful and exciting and positional chess is weird and boring. That is, if you don't under...
These days you can find anything on the Internet. For example, if you like hard rock and chess, then this video is for you! You can notice that they set up the board correctly (the a1 square is black!) and the position from their ga...
The first part of this article has brought a great response and many reader suggestions. But I have a confession to make. It was a totally tongue-in-cheek article and I am surprised that the majority of our readers took it for face ...
Some time ago, I wrote an article with a similar title where we discussed a sacrifice that happens when Black plays h7-h6 and attacks White's Ng5, but instead of moving the knight back, White plays Ng5xf7! starting an attack. Today we'll analyze...
In 1920s, the world chess champion Jose Raul Capablanca was at the height of his career. He was so much better than anyone else that he was called "the chess machine" due to the merciless precision of his play. So when Capablanca predicted ...
Garry Kasparov is definitely one of the best players in the history of chess. His games have been analyzed over and over in hundreds of books and thousands of articles and videos. Then how can I be so sure that you somehow missed some of his bri...
Computers continually change the way we play chess. The reports about new cases of computer cheating are a sad reality these days. We already discussed the many way computers affect chess in this series of articles: (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 an...
July was the month of chess weddings. Dutch super-GM Anish Giri got married to Georgian IM Sopiko Guramishvili, and Polish GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek tied the knot with Russian WGM Alina Kashlinskaya. If the title of this art...
The Chinese chess prodigy Wei Yi wins the hearts of fans with every new tournament he plays. It is not just his phenomenal results (with his current rating, he should be the highest-rated 16-year-old ever!), but also his sparkling style of play th...
The last month was rich for chess tournaments, so I cannot blame you if you missed the U.S. Junior Girls Championship. Meanwhile, I suspect that you'll hear a lot in the future about some of the girls who played there. If you ask me why I ...
Today we are going to continue our analysis of "chess-boxing" combos. According to Wikipedia, in boxing, the one-two combo is a nickname of a jab and cross combo. In chess, the one-two combo starts with a queen jab, which we discussed here. Then...
In my previous articles, I discussed two "chess boxing" combos, "The Chess Uppercut" and "The Chess Sucker Punch." Today, I'll show you "Fischer's Jab." The definition of a jab is "a quick, sharp blow, especially with the fist...
This is the time of the year when kids are passing their final exams in school, so I decided to offer a quiz for our readers too. We did regular chess tests before (for example, here and here), so today I decided to try something new. You...
Some time ago, we analyzed a typical combination where the key move resembles an uppercut in boxing. (You can find the article here.) Today we are going to discuss a similar tactical pattern where the main piece is again a rook. In the "chess up...
Some time ago we tried to answer the question "Do Grandmasters Know The Rules Of Chess?" and concluded that sometimes even world-class GMs forget the most basic rules of chess. But what about arbiters (called tournament directors in the U.S.)...
There is a positional sacrifice that is quite popular in the games of top players, particularly world champions. It works like this: you have your rook on an open file and you have an outpost there. (I hope most of our readers remember that an o...
The second world champion in chess history, Emanuel Lasker, was a unique person. Besides being the champion for 27 years (this record will never be beaten for sure!), he was also a famous mathematician and philosopher. In his prime Lasker ...
