This is a continuation of our discussion about typical patterns you can reuse in your games. The recipe for today's pattern is: 1) Fianchettoed Bb2 (Bb7 for Black) pointing at the opponent's King 2) Ne5 (Ne4) that joins the attack eventually 3)...
Whenever I present a beautiful game in my article, I inevitably see a comment that looks like this: “Wow! Such a beautiful game! I wouldn’t find this fantastic combo in a million years”. From my teaching experience I know that sometimes chess pla...
The US Chess Championship is the premier American event of the year. It is one of the longest running tournaments in the World ( dates back to 1845). Since all of the best US players participated in the US Championships, you can find many true g...
As soon as we learn the rules of chess, we realize that a Queen is the most powerful piece on the board. We treasure her and I noticed that many beginners prefer to get checkmated rather than give up a Queen. As a result, the games where one of...
This amazing story started 75 years ago and isn’t solved even today. Most of its participants took their secrets to their graves. As years pass, many more victims will be claimed. But let me start from the beginning… Part One. In 1934,...
In my previous articles I devoted a lot of time to opening traps. We saw different kinds of traps (good ones , bad ones) and we discussed how to avoid those nasty traps. But what if you deliberately want to fall into your opponent’s trap? Sounds...
I will always remember the day I signed up for my first chess club. Even though most of the members there were about my age (7-8 years old), they all seemed more experienced and smarter than me. So, when one of the kids asked me if I w...
Originally a second part to last week's article wasn’t even planned and yet, as you can see, it is here. What made me change my mind? It is that ‘Rush Hour 3’ movie. Well, actually not even the whole movie, but this particular part of the movi...
These days you can find a TV game show about anything. Well, almost about anything. There is no game show about chess. Call me a hopeless nerd, but I would love to see the face of the contestant who gets a question “ What chess player having a ...
In the first part of the article last week we discussed the hidden danger of innocent-looking openings. The idea is to take off guard an opponent who mistakenly thinks that a very modest (sometimes even primitive) opening is equivalent to a lack ...
Hello everyone! First, let me thank all readers of my column for their feedback. It gives me a lot of food for thought and also allows me to address your questions and concerns. Here I would like to answer a very simple and yet a very important ...
Last week we discussed how to avoid falling into an opening trap. But wouldn’t be it cool to set a trap on our own? At first it looks like not a difficult task since we learn all kinds of opening traps from the moment we start playi...
Hello dear chess fans! This is the first installment of my weekly column and I would like to thank chess.com for giving me this opportunity to share my experience with fellow chess players. Here I will discuss openings and&nbs...
