NM Laura Smith has always loved chess. By the time she was 13, she was the highest-rated player in her age group and was a silver medalist in the Girls Under 14 category at the Pan-American Championship. She has since turned her chess skills and e...
As 2024 was singing its swan song, we invited the community to participate in the 2025 Chess.com Improvement Challenge. Over 40,000 members rose to the challenge to elevate their game in the new year. As an action-packed year comes to a close, let...
As another year approaches its close, the activity at Chess.com is only ramping up. We are bringing back the Chess.com Global Championship and introduced a new tournament, all while continuing to put out product updates, computer opponents, and co...
Chess literature is full of amazing games by grandmasters. Yet, there are tens of millions of games played around the world every day, the vast majority of them by untitled players. On average, a grandmaster game will be higher quality, but the co...
I realize that for many readers, the very question in this article's title may sound absurd. GM Bobby Fischer has long been regarded as the epitome of a chess prodigy. With Fischer's own famous remark, "When I was eleven, I just got good," even as...
In a new Chess.com video, GM Judit Polgar shared what she considers her best game ever, against GM Viswanathan Anand in 1999 in Dos Hermanas, Spain. The first Indian to become a grandmaster would go on to earn his first of five world champion titl...
WCM Hannah Sayce has an impressive chess improvement story, and a unique one as well. Hannah worked all the way from a 700 Elo rating in 2021 to a 2200 rating in 2023, all while streaming her journey on Twitch. Earlier this year, Hannah earned the...
Few things rival the rush of finding a beautiful tactic on the board. Online or at the chess club, every player remembers the satisfaction of doing a great combination, the kind that makes you want to replay it again and again. But tactics aren&rs...
GM Ivan Sokolov's accomplishments as a player include reaching the 2700 "super grandmaster" club and a peak world ranking in the top 15. With all that, his coaching accomplishments may be even more impressive. His students have included GMs Alirez...
We live in an age of world records. Stories about a boy who wins the world title at 18, a girl who becomes World Champion at 16, or a pre-teen who becomes a grandmaster are not surprising anyone anymore. That's why when I read the news about yet a...
Electronic chess boards have been available for home use for as long as Radio Shack has been in existence. In fact, they've kept up with modern technology even better than the stores that used to sell them. The industry leader in terms of sales ...
GM Daniel Naroditsky had several roles at Chess.com during his tragically short life—he would have turned 30 years old as we publish this article on November 9, 2025—but his first role was as an article author. One of Naroditsky's many...
With less than two months left in the year, the Speed Chess Championship well underway, several recent collaborations and partnerships inside the Chess.com community, upcoming Chessable sales, and more, let's get right into this month's Chess.com ...
Have you ever blundered into a stalemate when you were winning a game? It happens to everyone. IM Eric Rosen has famously saved lost positions against several strong opponents with the same sneaky stalemate trap. Often stalemates stem from...
One of my first chess books had a very interesting feature: Every three to four chapters, it would present about a dozen short games. Initially, I just enjoyed playing through them, but as I started participating in tournaments, the thought of tra...
The 2025 Chess World Cup is scheduled to begin on October 30 in Goa, India. Two hundred and six of the best players in the world will compete in a knockout event, with the top 50 seeds receiving a first-round bye. This will be the 11th edition of ...
"Cramped positions carry within them the germ of defeat." – Siegbert Tarrasch This spring, two of the strongest chess engines in the world, Stockfish and Torch, played a match featuring some bizarre starting positions. We asked the Chess.c...
GM Melikset "Melik" Khachiyan is a coaching legend. The Armenian-born American grandmaster was not only the coach of one of the best players in history, GM Levon Aronian, in the 1990s, he has coached the highly successful U.S. women's team at the ...
IM David Pruess is one of the internet's most experienced content creators, having been in the game in one way or another for the better part of two decades. Along with IM Kostya Kavutskiy and GM Jesse Kraai, he is also a cofounder of ChessDojo, a...
A major source of excitement in the Speed Chess Championship stems from the inherently chaotic and unpredictable nature of blitz and bullet chess. But that doesn't mean we can't take a look at how these matches might go. These predictions are base...
The Chess.com train rolls on as we enter the last quarter of 2025 and barrel toward 2026. In the past month, the Autumn Split of Titled Tuesday began, we saw four players complete the next steps to the World Championship, released the schedule of ...
The chess community has its own language. It's easy to tell if somebody is new to chess, because they'll ask you things like, "Hey, what's en passant?" and, "How does the horse move?" One very important part of "understanding" chess is knowing...
It's time to find out who the best chess coach in the world is! CoachChamps round-robins are starting on October 7 at 1:30 p.m. ET / 17:00 CEST with the Under-800 group, followed by the other three groups over the next three days. The time is fina...
One of the greatest features of chess is that we can enjoy the games played decades or even hundreds of years ago. This is something very unique to chess. The best tennis rallies or soccer goals are completely lost for us if they happened before t...
