Disclaimer: This post is written by a chess coach and streamer who has not improved at chess in a long time. What does he know?! Play exclusively bullet and hyperbullet Chess is a game of pattern recognition! The more patterns you see, ...
The International Chess Federation, commonly referred to by its French acronym FIDE, was established in 1924. At the time, Jose Raul Capablanca was the World Chess Champion, and he continued his reign until 1927. During that time frame, FIDE start...
Written By Olya Kaye There are extraordinary people out there like GMs Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Bobby Fischer, Judit Polgar, and her sisters who took an ordinary game of chess to the next level. They have inspired the worl...
The 2020-21 FIDE Candidates Tournament will take its place in the annals of chess history as an unprecedented event. Never before has a tournament stopped due to force majeure been resumed a full year later. Yes, the first World Championship match...
Chess.com is happy to announce that we have just rolled out another new feature: the Library. You can now create a collection of games and store them conveniently all in one place. Go To Your Library! Whether you want to study a particular open...
GM Paul Keres is undeniably one of the greatest players of all time, a renowned chess writer, and one of a handful of grandmasters inevitably discussed whenever we speak of that hallowed company that came ever so close to winning the coveted title...
In chess, an opening transposition occurs when a sequence of moves leads to a position that is more commonly reached by a different move order—same resulting position, different paths to reach the position. Transpositions can be a powerful...
March 15, 1921 in Havana, Cuba—it was like looking into a mirror for Emanuel Lasker. His opponent opened with 1.d4 and he replied with 1...d5. Exactly 27 years prior, it was the 25-year-old Lasker who had White, facing 58-year-old Wilhelm St...
Written by Olya Kaye Back in the post-war, torn down Soviet Russia in the early 1960s, my grandfather made a move that significantly impacted the lives of the next three generations of women in his family. The move was simple: he taught my mothe...
Days 11 and 12 of PogChamps 3 presented by GRIP6 showed us once more how fast players can improve if they put in the work. Every player who took their time to study chess before or even throughout the event showed tremendous growth. Ludwig vs....
The fourth day of PogChamps 3 was nothing short of amazing. The unfortunate power outage in Texas caused the much anticipated xQc-Pokimane match to be postponed, but the other two matches more than made up for it. Watching the Rubius-Negreanu ga...
Written by Olya Kaye Playing chess simultaneously against 15 people was no easy feat. I admit, I was nervous. It was the fall of 2009 and I had not played much chess since 2001. My skills were rusty, but I was 25 and daring. You only live once...
I met GM Karen Asrian during the 1995 Armenian Championship. Back then, Karen was 15, but his advanced endgame skills and positional understanding were already deeply impressive. Evidently, a new talented player was coming up. Indeed, in the next ...
Hey, chess lovers! By now, most of us have stopped saying "Happy New Year," but it's not too late to take a look back at the first month of '21 - and shine a light on some cool things that have been happening around the site. Let's take a closer l...
There was an era, a time now frozen in memory, when it seemed like every single time I opened a chess magazine, there was GM Leonid Stein winning a tournament, or he was the subject of a column in a chess newspaper. From the late 1960s to the...
In the introduction to his famous book "Grandmaster Preparation," GM Lev Polugaevsky tells a story that happened on December 17, 1969, when he and ex-world champion GM Mikhail Botvinnik were walking on the streets of Belgrade. Mikhail Botvinnik ...
It's difficult to get a large group of chess players to agree on anything, and time controls are probably not the exception. Could the chess community come together, though, to select the best online time control from a short list of choices?...
In this article, you can find the archive of official rules for all Chess.com events with prize money. Use the table of contents below to jump to a specific event. All prize money events are also subject to the Chess.com Competitive Events Policy ...
Stalemate is the biggest miracle in chess—there, I said it. You might disagree and give me dozens of different examples of chess magic and you might be correct too. We all have different definitions of beauty and magic. Yes, when you see o...
In the past few years, I wrote a biography of the seventh world champion, Vasily Smyslov. The first volume, focused on the beginning of his chess career, is now available. I have analyzed hundreds of Smyslov’s games and tracked every step ...
The first Capablanca book that I read was "My Chess Career." In the very first pages, I could see that it was completely different from any chess book that I read before. It was almost like an advertisement where every single sentence was screamin...
Hey, chess lovers! The end of the year is almost upon us, and as if that isn't enough reason to celebrate, we still have to look back at the penultimate month of the year—and review all the interesting things that happened around the site in...
Registration is open for the 2021 Chess.com Daily Chess Championship, which is set to begin at 12 a.m. Pacific on January 1. Each year, the Chess.com Daily Chess Championship has set a new record for the largest tournament we've ever held. ...
There's no doubt about it: "The Queen's Gambit" is a huge hit. With incredible performances by the actors, beautiful sets, and a well-constructed plot, it's no wonder the miniseries is so successful. With 68 million households watching the show in...
