When the COVID-19 pandemic started, many people considered it mostly a nuisance that would be gone sooner rather than later. These days, popular opinion has shifted to another extreme. Life will never be quite the same even when the pandemic is fi...
On July 4, the day the United States of America celebrates its independence, let's take a look at the best chess players in American history. The United States has long produced top chess talent, with some of the game's finest players, authors a...
How can you win a chess game? In this lesson and video series for beginners, NM Dane Mattson demonstrates the key checkmates that you'll want to know. Try The Challenges! Not what you're looking for? Go back to the video guide. Four-Move...
How should you start out a chess game? In this lesson and video series for beginners, NM Dane Mattson demonstrates the key principles that will help you get a good position early in each game! Try The Challenges! Not what you're looking for?&nb...
How can you force checkmates and win games? NM Dane Mattson will show you how! Try The Challenges! Not what you're looking for? Go back to the video guide. Pawn Race: When both sides only have kings and pawns it's essential to co...
Chess.com provides robust teaching tools for chess coaches and trainers of all levels and experience. This article is a guide to our most commonly used tools, employed by many of the world's leading online chess teachers. Interactive Analysis ...
In the first part of this article, we talked about a clash of chess titans that started over 30 years ago between GMs Viswanathan Anand and Vassily Ivanchuk. In this unusual match, we can find everything we love about chess: beautiful comb...
You know how the pieces move. Now it's time to learn everything else! Follow along and learn how to win chess games! Try The Challenges! Not what you're looking for? Go back to the video guide. The Language of Chess: This video demo...
The 10th world champion Boris Spassky was married three times, but unfortunately all three marriages ended in divorce. Describing his first marriage, Spassky famously said, "we were like bishops of opposite color." When I saw this catchy phrase ...
Positions with material imbalances are difficult to play, especially for less-experienced chess players. You will never see a positional queen sacrifice or an exchange sacrifice in games played by people rated below 1700 or 1800. At this level, ...
The recent article by Vladimir Kramnik was quite fascinating. We've all had some weird "what if..." questions, like "what if people could fly?" or "what if there were no gravity?" Thanks to Kramnik and AlphaZero, we now see what happens to che...
This began many years ago as an experimental type of entry in the chess.com forums. Originally conceived to be an examination of the development of chess throughout the entire 19th century, since it never garnered the i...
How strong was Samuel Reshevsky in his prime? Well, he won the U.S. championship eight times, the same number as Bobby Fischer. Reshevsky also played eight times in the Chess Olympiads (six times on first board). Was he good enough to b...
Check out the best chess games of strong players! How can you beat a World Champion? How can you beat Hikaru Nakamura with a quiet opening? How should you sacrifice two exchanges and win? Check out these brilliant games and more! Try The Challen...
The 2019 World Fischer Random Chess Championship quarterfinals are here, with star players like Fabiano Caruana (@FabianoCaruana), Hikaru Nakamura (@Hikaru) and Alireza Firouzja (@Firouzja2003) set to take on five other elite grandmaster...
Football is sometimes called "chess on the gridiron." And by sometimes, I mean I just called it that. But the game is actually often compared to war, which is the most common metaphor for chess. And if football is war, the quarterback is the fie...
In the end of 1984, the leading Soviet magazine Chess In The USSR published a big article about the first game of the world championship match Capablanca-Alekhine, Buenos Aires 1927. The author, master V. Goldin (no relation the U.S. grandmaster...
What is a pawn structure? From my online glossary, I define it as “the positioning of the whole pawn mass. Also referred to as the pawn skeleton. This positioning of the pawns is what usually dictates the types of plans available...
There is a well-known chess joke (or maybe not even a joke!) that it is much more difficult to sacrifice a pawn than a queen. Indeed, in most queen sacrifices you get huge dividends right away, since it is difficult to imagine a player sacrifici...
What is pawn structure? From my online glossary, I define it as “the positioning of the whole pawn mass. Also referred to as the pawn skeleton. This positioning of the pawns is what usually dictates the types of plans available in a given ...
[cover image from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll; illustrated by Peter Newell, 1902 ] ___________________________________________________________________________________________________...
One of the most promising Dutch junior players of the early 1970s was Roy Dieks from Amsterdam. In the final of the 1972 European Youth Championship, held in Groningen, The Netherlands, Dieks played a crucial game against Tony Miles (who would lat...
Chess.com is thrilled to announce the release of our "Mastery" series of chess lessons. On New Year's Day 2019, we released an update to Chess.com/lessons, providing over 130 videos with interactive challenge questions to help players advance fr...
Chess board dimensions aren't as simple as one might think. The basic geometry of the chess board isn't difficult to grasp, but chess board dimensions also include the size of the squares on the board. One of the most important aspects...
