One hundred years ago the chess world witnessed one of the greatest chess tournaments of all time, Saint Petersburg 1914. Its storylines were numerous and compelling: Capablanca's early domination, Alekhine's first major international success, Rub...
Chess has had some difficulty throughout the years in presenting itself as a form of public entertainment. There has been some isolated cases where chess made good TV and even a few instances where chess was limelighted and managed to captiv...
In our first look at this pawn structure in Part 3a we explored the piece setups, dynamics, and general plans of the Burn Variation of the French Defense. Though doubling one’s kingside pawns early in the game may look idiotic, the resulting struc...
In this article I want to look at "Ngf3 systems" of the French- Tarrasch Variation,( the "Universal System" ) and I would like to explore an interesting and rare setup. Black has many alternatives to the seventh move and can directly play on the ...
When a player starts out, he’s told various rules that will help him navigate through the choppy waters of chess. A few basic ones are: Don’t hang your pieces Don’t swallow and talk at the same time Castle as quickly as possible Don’t allow your ...
A material imbalance in the endgame provides an unusual type of play. Here we watch the spectacle of pieces, each with different capabilities, fighting, trying to change the terrain to their own advantage. It is like two knights on horseback fight...
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...
