In his 1968 book called "The Poor Knight" ("Рыцарь бедный"). Vasily Panov described 23 year old Mikhail Tschigorin walking down Nevsky Prospect, a busy thoroughfare in St. Petersburg, with his friend Fedor discussing chess, a game Mikhail f...
Positional Attacks The third installment of the best-selling series of attack books - Formation Attacks, Formation Attack Strategies, and now, Positional Attacks is another 500 page book, full of great attack information with 533 fabulous attack ...
Attacking 101: Volume #001 The goal of the books in this series (Attacking 101: Volume #nnn) is to provide detailed analysis of my own attack games played against lower rated players. The players are all rated in the range of 1000 to 1800 - the t...
Recently, IM Jeremy Silman contributed an article featuring the talent of Ignatz Kolisch, one of the strongest, if not the strongest, player during the 1860s. Mr. Silman's article, Kolisch: Unknown Tactical Monster, demonstrated Kolis...
Bobby Fischer played 1st board for the US in four chess Olympiads, the final one being Siegen in 1970. In 1972, after beating Spassky, the first major event he skipped (and never played again!) was that summer's Olympiad in Skopje. Fischer also p...
Today we’ll look at three games and one comment. Each entry has important instructive points that are well worth pondering. We’ll start with the comment, alluding to my article, You Have It He Doesn’t! Part 1, which was all about...
In a recent tournament, one game reached a certain ending which I had previously played a full eight years ago. That was a decent memory of a very different time. I wasn't even an IM yet, and I was still trying to establish a life in Philadelphia ...
In the 1990s, when Pete Sampras dominated Wimbledon, he would sometimes win entire matches without a rally longer than a few hits. Expect the same this Saturday, as two energetic blitz specialists (and talented tennis players) lace up for Death Ma...
Quite a few amateurs become a bit confused when game annotations talk about the enormous importance of the dark squares in one position or another. Yes, everyone knows what the dark squares are, but in most cases, one is left wondering why they ar...
In Part Six of this seven-part series, we saw Alekhine lose the World Championship to Max Euwe in 1935, only to win it back in 1937. After shocking the world (and Euwe, who was sure he would finish Alekhine off once and for all) with that ep...
In this article I want to show some intresting things from the amazing Avro tournament. The tournament was played in 1938 with 8 best players from the 1938 FIDE list! You can see the player's names: Paul Keres Reuben Fine Salo Flohr Mikhail Bo...
Scrapbook Prologue: The U.S. Open chess tournament has been around since 1900 when it was called the Western Chess Association Championship and first won by Louis Uedemann, the creator of the Uedemann Code which ...
Chess.com's 21st Death Match will have GMs Georg Meier and Imre Balog at the card table on Saturday, February 15 at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific. (GMT - 8) But who brings better cards to the casino? Meier, FIDE 2636, has a chip lead...
Every chess player dreams of improving his game. He might simply want to smash his friends. He might want that 1200 rating to turn into a 1600 rating. Or he might be sick and tired of not knowing why he lost games X, Y, and Z. Study certainly help...
Many openings (especially when you play Black) have specific strategical problems typical for that particular opening. If you play the French Defense, then the bishop on c8 is your constant headache. In the Tarrasch Defense you need to live with a...
The Order of the Mandarins of the Yellow Button In the second half of the 19th century, a group of chess players in the Boston area formed a somewhat informal, yet exclusive coterie along the lines of the famous German...
A distinctive structure arises from the French Defense, featuring White's space advantage and Black's restricted light-squared bishop. Against this, Black hopes for counterplay via the pawn break ...f6 and queenside counterplay on the c-file and o...
One The Conflict That Never Was Jeffrey Baffo wrote (on Facebook): “Move First, Think Later. That book creates a major conflict between Jeremy Silman/traditional methods and what Hendriks is saying.” Answer: I’m answering this question for all...
Cafés or Coffee Houses probably originated in 16th century Turkey and quickly expanded into Persia, Arabia, Egypt and other Islamic nations. Even there they were havens for political idealists, philoso...
It's never too late to learn how to play chess—the most popular game in the world! Learning the rules of chess is easy: Set Up The Chess Board Learn To Move The Pieces Discover The Special Rules Learn Who Makes The First Move Check O...
"I read chess books and I understand them but when I get the same situations in a game I don't do the right things." This is a common complaint, but it is so generic that, unless I knew exactly what the viewer read and his chess situation, it is ...
Master Files 3.5 Contents Introduction Staying Protected The Importance of a Pawn Break How to Beat a Grandmaster The Twelve Puzzles of Christmas Introduction Hello fellow Chess.com members, and Merry Christmas! As a young child I learned...
When I was doing readers’ games (and I’ll return to that at some point next year) I would heap praise on good moves or even interesting moves, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call a horrible move what it was... horrible. Some readers ...
Playing the French is the second opening repertoire book by the Quality Chess authors Jacob Aagaard and Nikolaos Ntirlis. I was very enthusiastic about their first book, The Tarrasch Defence (2011), not because I am a great fan of this opening mys...
