IM Yaacov Norowitz's love of chess is very apparent, and this passion for the game is one of the main things he passes on to his students. Yaacov is also a Chessable author, where his third course, The Yaac Attack - Fajarowicz Gambit for Black, is...
GM Judit Polgar is considered by nearly all chess fans to be the greatest woman player in the history of the sport, and one of the very best players full stop as well. Although she retired from playing chess competitively in 2014, Polgar has remai...
In February 2022, I hit a new peak blitz rating of 2474. I had been grinding online blitz hard for several years, gradually improving from the 2100s, and finally I was ready to sniff the rare air of 2500. But just a little later, I had fallen out ...
The 2026 FIDE Candidates Tournament is an event a true chess aficionado can only dream about. Exciting chess, a tour de force by GM Javokhir Sindarov, and unprecedented online coverage. And yet, as I watch some games, I feel a quiet sense of sadne...
WIM Anna Kantane, known on Twitch and YouTube as KantannaChess always balances her enthusiastic streaming with an active playing career and motherhood. Anna has been streaming and creating content for 2.5 years, and continues to grow her audience ...
GM Ben Finegold is well known for his chess rules to live by, most famously, "never play f6." A black pawn almost never belongs on f6. It's dangerous for the black king and makes it hard to move other pieces on the kingside. Finegold teaching ...
Things are opening up on Chess.com, where the Chess.com Open Playoffs are coming up, and a brand new way to study openings on Chessable also available. And with the Candidates Tournament ongoing in addition to the Chess.com Open, there's no shorta...
In one of his games at the 1958 Chess Olympiad in Munich, GM Mikhail "the Magician" Tal, true to his style, sacrificed a pawn. His team member, then world champion GM Mikhail Botvinnik, asked him, "why did you sacrifice that pawn?" "It was in my w...
It’s that time again. Every two years, the FIDE Candidates Tournament arrives, ready to nominate another challenger to go into the lion’s den and face off against the reigning World Champion of chess, and every two years, we have to an...
Twenty-year-old GM Javokhir Sindarov is the youngest of eight participants in the upcoming 2026 FIDE Candidates Tournament, the event that will determine the next challenger to World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju. He qualified in November by winning t...
Playing against children in open chess tournaments has become a very common experience in modern chess. One of the beautiful things about chess is that age, race, and gender hardly matter at the board. Even a 10-year-old can compete against experi...
Just because you're playing in the 2026 Candidates Tournament doesn't mean you can't rank your opponents ahead of time. Seven grandmasters, including four of the candidates, recently gave their takes about the field and the tournament which begins...
GM Yaroslav "Yaro" Zherebukh has an impressive resume as a player, when he won the 2015 U.S. Masters and later qualified for the 2017 U.S. Championship, where he won his game against defending champion GM Fabiano Caruana. Yaro has an equally impre...
The chess world holds its breath as it awaits the start of the most important over-the-board tournament of the year. The 2026 FIDE Candidates Tournament and 2026 FIDE Women's Candidates Tournament kick off on March 29 at 8:30 a.m. ET / 14:30 CEST ...
The women’s world championship cycle hasn’t always looked like this, and the Women’s Candidates tournament certainly hasn’t always been held concurrently with the Open. But isn’t it way more exciting to be able to che...
FM Ilija Stanojevic—Eleyah on YouTube and Eleyah.fm on Instagram—is finding ways to both educate and entertain viewers, whether with in-depth, long form analysis of opening variations and other serious chess topics, or dramatic, short ...
If you're anything like me, then you're freaking out right now over the much-awaited 2026 Candidates Tournament. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The question is not who will win… but who should you root for? As I’m sure you kn...
As the first quarter of 2026 enters its final weeks, some of the biggest tournaments in both online and over-the-board chess are happening, with the Chess.com Open starting March 14 and the Candidates Tournament, to determine the next world champi...
Quantity has a quality all its own —Thomas A. Callaghan Jr In 2019, GM Hikaru Nakamura was over the hill. He was 32 years old and had gradually dropped nearly 70 points from his rating peak four years earlier, falling from number two...
The passing of legendary GM Jan Timman is a great loss for the chess world. Not only was he an elite player, often called "The Best of the West," but he was also a truly unique personality. When I saw his photos in chess magazines in the 1980s, ...
In the world of chess, a prodigy is more than just a talented kid. A chess prodigy defies their age and, while still in grade school, often topples seasoned, adult grandmasters. The four GMs Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Alireza Firouzja, and...
GM Judit Polgar, everyone's choice for the greatest woman chess player in history, has been making the rounds since the release of Queen of Chess, the hit Netflix documentary about her life in chess. Last week, she sat down at a board with Chess.c...
A national master from Southern California, NM Craig Clawitter also has a winning career record against a certain grandmaster—technically. (You'll have to read on to see who and under what circumstances!) For more than 20 years, Craig h...
At just 10 years old, English prodigy WIM Bodhana Sivanandan can already be considered to be one of the several celebrities to attend the 2025 Speed Chess Championship, which took place in London on February 7 and 8. In casual games played in the ...
GM Judit Polgar has been enjoying some major moments in the spotlight in recent weeks, with the success of Netflix's documentary Queen of Chess. In a fresh interview with Chess.com, the Hungarian chess legend shared her thoughts about the response...
