Hello everyone! It is an honor and a pleasure to be the new Friday columnist for Chess.com. Chess and writing are two of my greatest passions, and I am very excited to be able to combine them on a weekly basis. I cannot wait to start analyzing gam...
WHY I WRITE ABOUT THE CHESS GREATS In my view, it’s important for chess fans to embrace a chess hero, and after studying his life and games, moving onto another chess hero. It’s fun, you learn a lot, and it makes the whole chess expe...
In the first two parts of this series we discussed the cases where White firmly occupies the key central d5-square with one of his pieces. If such a centralized piece cannot be successfully challenged, Black usually experience serious problems. Bu...
I left Part 3 of this 7-part series with Alekhine beating Capablanca in their World Championship. Here’s how that article ended: The match itself was a long, extremely tiring affair that covered 34 games before Alekhine achieved the necess...
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...
FIDE Master Curt Brasket was a towering figure in Minnesota chess, having won the state championship a record 16 times. On January 24, 2014, he passed away in his sleep at the age of 81, having battled Parkinson’s disease for nearly 40 years. His ...
Curse of the Hasty Pawn Advance EvgeniyZh (1192) – raj475 (1324)ICC Live Game (30-0), 2014 1.e4 b6 2.e4 e6 3.e5 I’ve seen many sub-1500 rated players make this kind of hasty pawn advance, and I will take this opportunity to make a comment abou...
One of the first principles that an early, intermediate-level chess player learns is that rooks on the seventh rank are powerful. In Russian we call the seventh (or second) rank “obzhornyi” (обжорный ), roughly translating into &l...
I was a bit surprised at the comments about the study of master games made under my last Q & A (Snarky Silman, blah, blah, blah). As is always the case, everyone of every rating had an opinion. I’ve already written about this several tim...
My relationship with International Master John Grefe was complex, with many ups and downs. I met him two days after I arrived in San Francisco. At that time I was a penniless 18-year-old chess professional who was sleeping on a friend’s floo...
Carlsen's ability to improve pieces is exceptional. In last week's article we explored some of the diagonal piece maneuvers from the new world champion's practice. Either a queen or a bishop moved to a more active position, so that another piece c...
My last article didn’t have any chess puzzles, which I know Chess.com readers enjoy. To make up for that, we’ll have a simple article this week composed entirely of puzzles. And, as I did in Part 2 of this series, all examples will be ...
This article introduces new series of articles dedicated to the magnificent play of our current world champion - Magnus Carlsen. A series of five or more articles will span different positional and tactical ideas that Carlsen effectively uses in h...
In “Train Your Brain, Target Consciousness” (Part 1, Part 2) we took a look at weak squares and weak pawns. When studying things like this, you first look at the concept (in this case weak squares and/or weak pawns), you try to intellectually gras...
The so-called Lasker variation of the Scandinavian Defense (a.k.a. Center Counter) arises after this sequence of moves: I was not able to find one single game where the second world champion played the variation named after him. My guess is...
My last two articles (Train Your Brain! Target Consciousness Part 1, and How to Train Your Brain) were about weak squares and weak pawns, which I view as targets that need to be devoured or used. Creating a permanent seek-and-destroy mentality whe...
Rudolf Spielmann was born in Vienna on May 5, 1883, and he learned how to play chess at a very young age. Reti, in his classic book Masters of the Chessboard, said this: “He learned to play while still a boy and was exhibited in public as ...
Johannes Zukertort was born September 7th, 1842 in Lublin, Poland. It’s always interesting to wonder what a person will eventually become — a life in the military perhaps, a businessman, will he struggle to survive, a doctor or lawyer, or will he ...
Since the beginning of time everyone had an opinion, whether or not they had a clue about the subject being discussed. However, in the past opinions usually stayed in one’s own mind or went no further than your friends or acquaintances. Now that’s...
Last week we analyzed the games where great world champions (Fischer, Petrosian, Smyslov) happily parted with their fianchettoed bishops to isolate and double their opponent's pawns, turning them into long-term weaknesses. Another famous world cha...
The “Plan” Fails In Part Two of our Alekhine series, I described Alekhine’s plan to force a match with Capablanca: “Play against the world’s best and win every tournament, thus showing that he was the true challenger to the title. And, at first h...
I constantly see amateurs raving about how tactics is 99% of chess. However, if that was actually the case then chess wouldn’t be the amazing game that it is. A true fan of the game sees beauty in opening theory, in subtle positional play, in barn...
In my previous article (Having Fun With Blunders), I gave my personal definition of a blunder (some will choose to make use of it, others won’t, and the world will continue to turn). To make the article fun to read, I mixed a serious and fir...
Recently I was involved in a small discussion about blunders and was shocked that the term’s meaning wasn’t as rock solid as I had thought. Everyone is used to symbols like “?” (poor or bad move), “?!” (dubious), “!” (good or excellent move), “!?”...
