The US Chess League pits the chess cities of the United States against each other in a winner-take-all, no-holds-barred annual battle royale. In 2013, 16 cities faced off for the title of US Chess League Champion. Divided into two divisi...
The 2015 edition of Norway Chess was a memorable event in several ways. Above all, it heralded the resurgence of Veselin Topalov and Viswanathan Anand, who both stormed through the field and turned in 2900+ performances. Topalov won the tournament...
Many have tried to increase chess awareness over the years. None have succeeded to the degree GM Maurice Ashley did recently, in the Millionaire Chess Open of October 2014. GM Ashley, a brilliant entrepreneur, took a page from the NFL for his ow...
Every serious chess player dreams of creating his own Mona Lisa — a game so beautiful and memorable that he will look back on it for the rest of his career. Unfortunately, many players tend to equate the word brilliancy with fou...
GM Sam Shankland is one of the most promising young players to have emerged from the United States in recent years. Earning his GM title by the age of 21, Shankland built a considerable library of instructive and beautiful games by the time most p...
Explore the rise to GM by Ben Finegold in this fun series. Learn how a strong master earns the coveted grandmaster title, experiencing the highs and lows along with GM Finegold himself. You might be surprised by the kind of preparation it tak...
I clearly remember that day in March 2005 when Garry Kasparov announced his retirement from professional chess. I was convinced that it was all a misunderstanding, that my days of waking up at dawn to watch Garry massacre one super-GM after...
In his excellent 1995 work Winning Chess Brilliancies (part of the acclaimed Winning Chess series), GM Yasser Seirawan developed a novel analytical method: he literally broke every game down into its three stages, separately analyzing the opening,...
When discussing great games, many chess fans always think of slashing attacks and outrageous combinations. While every world-class player tossed out more than a few epic combinations at some point in his career, positional masterpieces are far har...
One of the most interesting continual threads in the chess.com forums is called "Post Your Own Miniatures Here." Many very good players post their less-than-thirty-moves games showing off their skill, and sometimes brilliance, in punishing we...
As promised, we will continue our coverage of the greatest upsets in chess history by moving in reverse chronological order. Of course, it is rather ludicrous to assume that upsets did not exist before Elo ratings were implemented and recognized...
The Chess Olympiad is one of my favorite events. In the words of the Romanian GM Mihail Marin, "the champions themselves do not mind rubbing shoulders with mere mortals, even though this may look risky for their ratings." Most lopsided matchups,...
So I was logged on ICC when a friend of mine said "JMB, I have a game to show you!" When he showed me I was blown away. I could only dream of playing such a game! To be honest, if someone had played this game against m...
Whether you like it or not, Paul Morphy is almost invariably remembered for his brilliant victory over the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard in 1858 (refresh your memory here). And for good reason! However, while Morphy indeed conducted a bril...
Esta partida fue protagonizada por Anderssen contra Kieseritzky en la ciudad de Londres el año 1851. Pasó a la historia por el gran juego combinativo del jugador de blancas, quien sacrifica nada menos que una pieza menor en la apertura, las dos to...
Positional Attacks The third installment of the best-selling series of attack books - Formation Attacks, Formation Attack Strategies, and now, Positional Attacks is another 500 page book, full of great attack information with 533 fabulous attack ...
Attacking 101: Volume #001 The goal of the books in this series (Attacking 101: Volume #nnn) is to provide detailed analysis of my own attack games played against lower rated players. The players are all rated in the range of 1000 to 1800 - the t...
Formation Attack Strategies The much awaited sequel to the best selling book, “Formation Attacks”, has arrived. “Formation Attack Strategies” is another 500 page book, full of great attack information with 579 fabulous attack games from all openi...
Formation Attacks The Ultimate Chess Attack Book has finally arrived! As a Chess Master that has spent many years playing aggressive and attacking chess, I was quite dismayed during a past visit to my local bookstor...
There are certain rare actions in chess that elicit an almost emotional response - windmills, smothered mates, advantageous underpromotions and what I want to include here: Checkmate by Castling. &nb...
Some peoples think, grandmasters can't make mistakes. Today I want to say a very important rule: Grandmasters also can make mistakes! Not only 2200-2300 players miss for example a rook. This thing I want to tell in some diagrams. After this unbe...
In this article I want to show some intresting things from the amazing Avro tournament. The tournament was played in 1938 with 8 best players from the 1938 FIDE list! You can see the player's names: Paul Keres Reuben Fine Salo Flohr Mikhail Bo...
If someone knows surprising results of chess games I would be interested to read. Here are some of them from Finnish championship tournament that was played last year 10th-18th June. To just keep the article shorter I mostly just added Houdini 3 e...
After a long break I played again in the Hungarian team championship league on Sunday at 2nd of February. I was excited before the game. I planned to use my prepared ideas in the slav defense. 2 years ago I helped an Indian student, a woman grandm...
