How should you play when you face an opponent who is hundreds of points higher rated than you are and has a wealth of experience? Should you play your regular opening or choose something tricky that might catch the opponent in a trap? Should you g...
Sacrifices of the major pieces used to be fairly common among top chess players, but nowadays are rarely seen when top grandmasters square off. However, in the game that follows, Nigel Short sacrifices his queen...after a mere seven moves have ...
Now that Hikaru Nakamura is our leading player let's take a look at his first victory over a GM, played back in 1998 when Hikaru was just 10 years old.
Most great games are almost hard to avoid. They are published in magazines and a variety of books and appear on websites all over the world. This game, which in my opinion contains some of Kasparov's best moves, did not get such a treatment. Both...
In this week's edition I would like to continue with last week's exciting theme! The knowledge of typical and common positions is a giant step towards chess mastery. Russian folkore tells us that there exist 300 secret positions that-- if learned...
Classic: Of the first or highest quality, class, or rank; serving as a standard, model, or guide. --Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 05 Jan. 2010. There are no precise criteria for defining the classics in chess. It would be a game ...
In the following game, played in a simultaneous exhibition against a well-known senior master from Maryland, White plays a variation of the Bayonet Attack vs. the King's Indian Defense, throwing in 9. Nd2 before 10. b4. A war is waged over contro...
In July at the World Open, Ray Robson beat me in a very complicated Poison Pawn Winawer. I got my second crack at the new US hope at the SPICE Cup in the 3rd round. As at the World Open, I had the black pieces, and while the opening was a very dif...
Mikhail Tal, the former world champion, and Bent Larsen, the Great Dane, met in a semifinal candidates match in 1965. Larsen was ahead after winning game one. Tal won game two. Games three and four were draws. Larsen won game five and Tal came bac...
While I was writing my last article about the “Janowski Bishops,” I found an exciting game between Janowski and Chajes, New York, Rice Tournament, 1916. The combination conceived by Janowski, besides being too deep, has an interesting history. Fif...
The past two weeks, I've shared my games from rounds 4 and 6 of the Montreal International. This week, I want to share my game from the 5th round, as white against GM Sergei Tiviakov. With a draw against Bacrot in the books, I was looking to take...
The games of the old masters were characterized by a more free-wheeling attitude with respect to material. A development advantage was the holy grail for chess players, and they would strive for that lead by sacrificing whatever it took. Pawns wer...
The London 1883 chess tournament was one of the most important competitions of the nineteenth century where most of the leading player competed. It was won convincingly by Johannes Zukertort (22/26) ahead of Wilhelm Steinitz (19/26) by three point...
Hi everyone, and welcome to my second "annotated" game from my vast number of blitz games played on live chess here. This time the game is set to a mere 3 minutes for the entire game. Be prepared for one heck of a beautiful attacking pattern. ...
Miguel Najdorf (1910-1997) was born in Warsaw, Poland. He was playing at the Buenos Aires Olympiad in 1939 when World War II broke out, and decided not to attempt to return home, taking Argentine citizenship.Today I want to share with you a myster...
Zugzwang: A situation in which a player is limited to moves that cost pieces or have a damaging positional effect or A situation in a chess game in which a player is forced to make an undesirable or disadvantageous move.According to Nimzowitsch, w...
ed note: GM Bhat is in Brazil playing in the Contintental Championship. In his absence, who better to replace him than... a former student of his. IM Sam Shankland has two GM norms and is quite a strong player in his own right. In July he played 3...
The following game was played in Hagerstown (Maryland) City Park, once voted the "second most beautiful city park in America" (I presume Central Park in NYC is first). I was visiting relatives there, and we decided to go for a walk in the park. ...
After my tournament in Montreal, I went to Philly to play the 7-day schedule of the World Open. The 7-day featured a pretty small group of players, most of whom were above 2500! After a draw with GM Vladimir Potkin (2721 USCF) in round 1, I got th...
It was July 2007 and I was playing casually some chess at Playchess.com, when, unexpectedly, my game formula matched me to play a game with the handle called Raffael, which was currently the top blitz player in the honorary list. Well-known by all...
In his moment, Akiba Rubinstein (1882-1961) played the most perfect chess of the epoch! Many of his games were models of precision. He played the endgames like the gods! said Tartakower, a leading master at the time. Before World War I, Rubinstein...
All of us admire chess sacrifices. Sometimes it is possible to win (quite correctly, not as a result of an opponent’s blunder) even being a piece down. Usually it is connected with an opportunity to convey a tactical operation – give a...
The fifth world champion Max Euwe (1901-1981) was a truly interesting man: mathematician, engineer, astronomer and computer specialist. He is the only world champion that was not a professional! But this did not impede him from reaching the chess ...
