We've kicked off a new year, but beginning chess players still play the same unsound chess ideas that have been tried by inexperienced players for decades. Unless their opponents are similarly new to the game, players relying on these unsophisti...
There are many basic endgame rules you can find in any chess manual: Centralize your king! Create an outside passed pawn! Rooks should be placed behind passed pawns! ...I bet you've heard them dozens of times. And yet one very...
As beginners, we are invariably warned that pawn grabbing in the opening is a cardinal sin. Indeed, what could be more incautious than throwing your development to the wind and setting yourself up for tactical calamity? Pawn grabbing usually st...
As 2014 draws to a close, it’s a natural time to look back at the best chess of the year. The past year was a good one for fans of the world’s most popular board game. There was an exciting world championship match, several amaz...
The last couple of months were a real paradise for true chess aficionados. The world's top events (including the world championship!) followed one after another. Today, I offer you an opportunity to test your chess skills and find the star moves...
Most people are fascinated by optical illusions. Indeed it is a very strange feeling that what you see with your own eyes is not exactly what it is. This reminds me of the punchline to the old joke that I already mentioned in this article: "who ...
The chess world gasped when in game six of this year's world championship match, both Carlsen and Anand missed a simple tactical shot 26...Nxe5! (see #10 in the second part of this series). Some reporters even rushed to call it "the bi...
Before we continue our "hit parade" of blunders, I'd like to thank our readers (and especially FritsFritschy) for their active participation in our discussion about the historic "blunder" in the first game of the Spassky-Fischer match that we...
The world championship match Carlsen-Anand is over now and it brings some relief to me because I was afraid that I might have to expand this collection of blunders. Thankfully, despite being tired, both contenders didn't commit any huge b...
Magnus Carlsen won the 2014 world championship match in game 11 today to defend his title. But the sixth game of the Carlsen-Anand match made waves around the world. Some chess journalists rushed to christen the astonishing m...
In the first part of this article, we discussed how Alexey Shirov discovered a beautiful idea during a postmortem analysis of his game vs. GM Azmaiparashvili. Unexpectedly, he got a chance to use a similar idea in the last round of the sam...
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said: "Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed; in the second it is opposed; in the third it is regarded as self-evident." There are ...
Many folks see the endgame as the most boring part of the game, where it is all about the technique. Even though some endgames require a decent amount of technique and sometimes can look boring for inexperienced chess players, they can still ...
In the previous installment of this series, we discussed the situations where it is beneficial to break one of the cardinal rules of chess: do not push pawns in front of your king. As you could notice, in all the games that we analyzed last time...
In the first two installments of this article, we discussed the situations where it is beneficial to ignore well established principles of chess. Today we'll talk about another "sacred cow" of chess rules, the most dangerous one to bend! H...
In the first part of this article, we discussed the situations where well-known chess rules can be successfully ignored. On the other hand, the classical rule that you should develop your pieces in the opening as quickly as possible is not easy ...
I bet you've all heard an old joke where a man returns from a business trip one day earlier than planned and catches his wife with another man. She denies that anything is going on between her and that man trusts her, even though the obvious evide...
Pins are very popular and powerful chess weapons, and I am sure you've used them in dozens of your own games. If you just started playing chess and never heard about pins, I strongly recommend you check the Tactics Trainer. But even if you are...
In the beginning of 1980s, a young and promising British international master (let's call him Nigel) played a chess tournament in the Soviet Union. At that point, a tournament in the USSR was the best possible chess school for any chess player, an...
The recently finished Sinquefield Cup is going to attract chess players' attention for a long time. Mostly, chess analysts will concentrate their efforts trying to explain the phenomenal result of Fabiano Caruana. You can read my version here.&nbs...
The Sinquefield Cup is a fantastic event! It is the strongest tournament in chess history, the players demostrate fighting, very "tasty" chess, and the coverage on the official website is amazing. Of course, the whole chess community must thank Re...
Mikhail Botvinnik had regained the world championship in 1958, but soon after the chess world's attention was captured by the rapid ascent of a young player with an unusually sharp and creative style: the Latvian Mikhail Tal. Frequently ma...
You cannot be a really strong chess player unless you know how to play endgames. This simple statement was a cornerstone of the Soviet school of chess. There was even a well known Russian chess saying: "С молодёжью - в эндшпиль!" -- which...
In the first part of this article, we left our Chess Terminator playing countless blitz and bullet games during the last free day of the championship. In the following seventh round, Nakamura had a very tough opponent. By the way, this is a good...
