We continue our exploration of classical chess games with the next immortal gem. It is a truly unique situation when a chess player became famous because of just one ultra short game he played (just 7 moves). Moreover, as far as I know, it is the...
Last week we started our little journey into chess history. We want to look at the most important classical games. The ones that moved chess theory and broadened the general understanding of the game. In my opinion no chess player can call h...
Once I had a conversation with a very strong chess player and he casually mentioned that he was going to delete all the old games from his database because they were practically useless. I don't remember exactly his definition of 'old games', but ...
The World Chess community celebrated the 100th anniversary of Mikhail Moiseevich Botvinnik a couple of days ago (he was born on August 17, 1911). He was the founder of the famous Soviet School of Chess which explains his popula...
In the final installment of our discussion about blunders I would like to talk about one of the most popular kinds of blunders. This kind of blunders is extremely popular in the games of not very advanced chess players, but from time to time even ...
Last week, when we discussed the way to avoid time trouble, one of the suggestions was "Prepare your openings! Besides an obvious benefit of playing good moves in a theoretical position, you'll also save some time on your clock in the opening!" &n...
The kind of blunders we are going to discuss today is by far the most popular one. There is no chess player who has never experienced this kind of blunder. 4.) Blunders due to time trouble I bet you can immediately remember the painful blunders ...
We continue our analysis of different kinds of blunders and today we'll discuss the most complicated one. The two kinds of blunder that I described in the first two parts of this article can be fixed relatively easily: (1) When you play a game you...
Today we'll continue to discuss the nature of chess blunders and the ways to prevent or at least minimize them. 2) Blunders due to premature relaxation This is an extremely common type of blunder and an especially painful one. It happens when y...
If you are a frequent participant of chess tournaments you can see a lot of different things there: different players, languages, openings, hairstyles etc. But there is one thing common to any chess tournament. You cannot miss it. It is in a tourn...
The first three parts of this article were devoted to the analysis of typical mistakes that cause opening disasters (and you would agree that it is a real disaster to lose a game in 10 moves or less!). Today you have a chance to demonstrate the kn...
In the previous two installments of this article we discussed how important it is to pay attention, know openings you play and watch out for forcing moves of your opponent. But even if you do all the above-mentioned things, there is still risk. S...
In the second part of the article we will continue to explore games where strong chess players (masters and grandmasters) lost their games in 10 moves or less. Today I want to discuss the most common reason (at least in my opinion) for quick openi...
In the last articles we discussed a good strategy to get a practical chance to beat someone much stronger than you. I want to emphasize the key words ('practical chance'), because as one of the readers (mightyrearranger) correctly pointed out: "At...
In the first part of this article (http://www.chess.com/article/view/how-to-beat-a-much-stronger-opponent) I discussed what I think is the best strategy to beat a much stronger opponent. I even showed my student's game where he was very close to ...
Most chess players face this problem pretty frequently: what should I do against a much stronger opponent? And here when we say "a much stronger opponent" , we talk about somebody who is at least 300-400 rating points higher. Let's start from maj...
We continue our analysis of typical attacking ideas in the King's Indian Attack (KIA). The trade of the 'd' pawns. Many inexperienced chessplayers facing the KIA for the first time try to open the center by playing d5xe4. Generally it is a good...
In last week's article (hocus-pocus) we discussed the connection between the King's Indian Defense (KID) and the King's Indian Attack (KIA). Today we'll analyze some typical attacking ideas of the KIA. The Nf3-g5 maneuver. This is the most aggre...
Exactly 20 years ago, in 1991, I was playing the Soviet Championship Under-26 years old. This was an invitational tournament for the top Soviet players and not surprisingly all participants of that tournament later became Grandmasters. One of the ...
Most chess players prefer to play White and the statistics clearly favors the side who opens the game first. One of the amazing features of Korchnoi's chess is the number of games he won with Black (unfortunately I know it from my own experience, ...
One of the best movies ever produced in my opinion is "Scent of a Woman". If you've seen the movie, then I don't need to explain why. In the very unlikely situation that you never watched the movie, stop right here and run, don't walk, to rent thi...
Last month the world chess community celebrated the 80th Birthday of the legendary Grandmaster Victor Lvovich Korchnoi. There are hundreds of books and thousands of articles devoted to this extraordinary person, so it is very difficult to write an...
The biggest part of Botvinnik's chess legacy is his contribution to opening theory. I don't think there is another chess player who could compete with Botvinnik in this department. The Patriarch managed to completely change whole openings! The be...
Amongst a variety of strategical and tactical ideas developed by Botvinnik, the one that really stands out is the position with an isolated Queen pawn on d4. According to Kasparov, this kind of position was a true Botvinnik favorite, where he dis...
