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...
Today I played a very interesting 90 minute + 5 sec Increment game against a chess.com member Apthyphim (rated 1980 or so on live chess). In my first article, I am going to analyze my game and give my thought processes on why I made each move. The...
When I was doing readers’ games (and I’ll return to that at some point next year) I would heap praise on good moves or even interesting moves, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call a horrible move what it was... horrible. Some readers ...
Dear readers! I think all member like tactics. Now I follow tactics, from Spassky: After this nice tactic, let see a pawn sacrifice in opening! The sacrifice not win the game, but black have a clear positional advantage. Now see Spassky, after...
Many of us know how hard it is to pull up a game against a solid opponent. But today, what I would like to show you is how to actually withstand the sharp attacks and precise maneuvers of a stronger player and be exactly that kind of nuisance all ...
Today's article is the continuation of the topic of Blunders in Modern Play. Last week we went over the examples of opening blunders from the World Cup tournament. Today I would like to concentrate on one example that features the position from a ...
Today's article features a fun topic of opening blunders! It feels great to catch an opponent in an opening trap, but not so great when we end up being caught by some tricky line. There's a variety of opening blunders and most of them have occurre...
