"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...
To many, GM Ben Finegold needs no introduction. With over 130,000 Twitch followers and 160,000 on YouTube, the gregarious grandmaster regularly plays viewers, analyzes games, offers advice, cracks jokes, and much more on camera. In September and O...
Most chess players have a favorite opening trap, a trick they use to win many quick games. At the highest level, these tricks have to be quite sophisticated to catch experienced opponents, but when you're new to chess, many opening traps can rake ...
By now you've probably heard that Chess.com Chief Chess Officer Danny Rensch just released his new memoir, Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life. He insists: "This is not a chess book." And indeed, well more than half of the material deals with hi...
Our September Coach of the Month, Lauren Goodkind, has more than a decade of experience as a chess coach for beginning and intermediate students all over the world, from her hometown of Menlo Park, California to Canada and Germany. Whether teachin...
If you missed the State Of Chess.com broadcast on September 2, it's not too late to get up to speed on everything that's new around the site this month, including information about the 2026 Esports World Cup (EWC) after the smashing 2025 debut of ...
The first CoachChamps is about to start, and we're excited to see who comes out on top as the best chess coach in the world! The event kicks off on September 10, with each of the eight participating coaches drafting students. From October 7 to Oct...
Imagine a situation where your pawn has reached the seventh rank, just one square away from fulfilling its dream of becoming a queen. However, none other than the opponent's king steps in front of the pawn, preventing its promotion. Who is going t...
If you're looking to get better at chess, the material on Chessable and the equivalent Chess.com Courses are some of the best educational resources you can find. Chessable is well-known for its huge variety of opening courses, but its endgame cont...
Becoming a stronger player is about finding ways to turn knowledge into skill. - GM Tiger Hillarp Persson in Tiger's Chaos Theory. When you're new to chess, improvement is relatively easy. Most of us lose our first few games, and then start...
WFM Charlotte "Charly" Sanati, known online as Azizana, only began streaming relatively recently, but she has already started to build "a really nice and engaging community" of nearly 10,000 followers on Twitch with a dedicated two-a-day streaming...
GM Magnus Carlsen, following in the footsteps of GMs Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu and Hikaru Nakamura, played a blindfold chess game against ChatGPT in a video published Tuesday. In less than 48 hours, it had already racked up more than 100,000 views...
While I have been playing competitive chess for almost 50 years, the question in the title of this article never occurred to me. It looked so natural: if you find yourself in a completely hopeless situation where you see no way out, then you resig...
As we enter August, it's been another big month for Chess.com, and for chess itself as the game reaches new audiences. The esports world unofficially welcomed chess to its ranks with the inaugural Esports World Cup tournament. Chess has also sprea...
GM Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko is a grandmaster, mathematics PhD, Chessable author... and August 2025 Chess.com Coach of the Month! Mykhaylo has counted GMs Bassem Amin, Ahmed Adly, and Alexander Ipatov among his students, not to mention the countless pl...
For anyone serious about chess improvement, Chessable is the premier place to learn the game. Chessable has hundreds of courses for all levels, from beginner to Lifetime Repertoires that even grandmasters study. With so much content, it can be tri...
Have you ever played a brilliant move in one of your games? How about more than one? They're hard to find, so it's difficult to score several in a game. However, there's one tactical trick that's likely to let you stack up multiple brilliant moves...
FM Nate Solon draws on his vast experience in chess, data science, poker, and more to offer a unique perspective to his students. Both a private coach and a popular, highly-rated author on Chessable, Nate is our Chess.com Coach of the Month for Ju...
