Who are the strongest chess players of all time? There are nearly as many opinions on the relative strength of great chess players as there are chess players. Opinions have been based on dominance, career longevity, brilliance of play, and numer...
GM Surya Shekhar Ganguly recently started a very promising interview series on his new YouTube channel. The first guest was none other than five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand. The Covid-19 pandemic has put the world on a stand-still...
St. Mary Magdalene Church in 1904 On May 17, 1898 Gertrude Field married Donald Anderson at St. Mary Magdalene Church, Wandsworth Common, England. Gertrude, known to her friends as Daisy (yes, Daisy ...
Preface: An official U.S. Women's Chess Championship has existed for over 80 years. The USCF lists 1937 as the first year. There have been many strong and important women players over the early years ...
The story of Sultan Khan, a remarkable chess talent from India who was brought to Europe by his master, won the British Championship three times, and defeated Jose Capablanca in a tournament game, is also a political tale. After seven years of res...
GM Romain Edouard is one of the great talents of the French chess community, as evidenced by his impressive record of achievements at the youth level. He took part in his first competition at the age of 10 and, in a meteoric rise, became European ...
Our beloved game of chess has had many legends, world champions, challengers, world-class players, and grandmasters. The games of these masters delight, inspire and teach us the ways of the royal game. It is common to discuss the greatest player...
There's a tendency for all of us to define chess through its best and most successful adherents. I've always been of the mind that, while there is no doubt that world champions, potential world champions and all other players near that str...
The second half of the FIDE Candidates has been postponed to a later date. Here's our story. GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave defeated GM Ian Nepomniachtchi in round seven of the FIDE Candidates Tournament in Yekaterinburg. As the first tiebreak...
Ding Liren, the current world number-three and strongest Chinese chess player in history, speaks to David Cox about the rise of Chinese men’s chess, his remarkable 100-game unbeaten streak and the difficulty of maintaining a relationship whi...
The chess world is full of intriguing players and intriguing stories going all the way back to the enigmatic Paul Morphy—but even among this hallowed, august company, Ossip Bernstein manages to stand out. Bernstein's career is noteworthy f...
My last article was about how George Koltanowski slowly got better and better as a chess player; first in the early/mid 1920s (boring and slow), and then in 1928 when he embraced dynamics. Though he was a strong player at that point, he was e...
IM Cyrus Lakdawala contributed to this article. In 2018, the reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen, played world number-two Fabiano Caruana for the world championship. Carlsen defeated Caruana in the rapid tiebreak, and successfully defend...
@Jed1w1zard writes: I am a club-level chess player. I was wondering if you could clear up an issue for me that I have repeatedly been encountering in my games. When I play as White, I typically like to play the London System since it’s a ...
Chess.com's newest coach of the month is IM Levy Rozman. Rozman is familiar to streaming fans, as his Twitch.tv/gothamchess channel is one of the largest and most successful on Twitch. Rozman brings a unique wit, humor and troll-shaming to the p...
How strong was Samuel Reshevsky in his prime? Well, he won the U.S. championship eight times, the same number as Bobby Fischer. Reshevsky also played eight times in the Chess Olympiads (six times on first board). Was he good enough to b...
Judit Polgar, the strongest female chess player of all time, speaks to David Cox about growing up as part of her father Laszlo's groundbreaking educational experiment, the famous touch-move controversy when she played Garry Kasparov in 1994 and wh...
The super-grandmaster Ian Nepomniatchi sat down with Chess.com ahead of his appearance in the 2019 FIDE World Fischer Random Chess Championship, where he will go head-to-head with Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So and the world champion Ma...
Samuel Reshevsky was born in Poland on November 26, 1911 and started to play chess at the age of four. He came to the U.S. permanently at age nine (1920). From 1924 to 1931 he quit chess completely to get an education in the U.S., and graduated...
IM Cyrus Lakdawala contributed to this article. In 1975, Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov were set to play for the world chess championship. Fischer, the reigning world champion, argued with the world chess federation (FIDE) over the format fo...
For Jeremy Silman's article on the early life of Pal Benko, click here. Pal Benko: My ticket to freedom was, naturally, chess. First on my agenda was to qualify for an out-of-country zonal. Of course, I didn’t want to play in a Soviet-co...
Hou Yifan, the youngest women’s world champion in history, tells David Cox about her journey to become one of the strongest female players of all time. Find out her thoughts on a "battle of the sexes" match against Magnus Carlsen, and why sh...
The updated standings and leaderboard information for Arena Kings season five are below. You can read the season five announcement here for complete details. Season Recap: Beginning on September 16, Arena Kings was back for ...
Pal Benko was born July 15, 1928 and died August 25, 2019 at the age of 91. Instead of throwing endless games at you (okay, okay…I will throw you a lot of games), I first want you to understand Benko’s personality and who Benko r...
Reminder: Deadline for entries is 5:59 p.m. Pacific time September 2. The biggest event in online chess is back for 2019, and the field of 16 grandmasters is set for the 2019 Speed Chess Championship beginning September 2 at 6 p.m. PDT. W...