GM Jonathan Tisdall's reflections on the Carlsen-Caruana World Championship at halftime. (You can read his preview of the match here.) For convenience, we've copied the games with GM Sam Shankland's annotations from our news reports. I arrived i...
Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana drew their sixth game of the 2018 world chess championship. The champion opened with 1. e4 for the first time, and the challenger answered with his trusty Petroff Defense. The opening 20 plies fe...
When I was a kid, I didn't watch much TV. You see, 40 years ago we had only two state-controlled TV channels in the Soviet Union, so most of the kids spent their time outdoors rather than watching boring news. Nevertheless, there was one weekly pr...
Almost every chess player with the slightest interest in the development of the game knows of François-André Danican, better known by the appellation Philidor, a family name given to his grandfather, Michel Danican, an obois...
The last European Chess Club Championship was a nightmare tournament for Peter Svidler. I don't recall another case of an elite grandmaster losing four games in a row against mostly lower-rated opponents! Only in the last round we could fin...
HOW TO START OUT I get many, many players (rated 800 to 1200) asking me what their style is, why do they lose when they had a better game, are their opponents cheating, how to get good fast, or simply how to get a higher rating. All thes...
The Global Chess Festival Online invites chess players around the world to celebrate chess by playing in a 24-hour 5|0 arena on Chess.com. Play will begin , concluding 24 hours later on the 13th. The event is part of the Global Chess Festival On...
"All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray..." Serendipity: As you look for one thing, you often find all sorts of interesting items in the process. I had been searching through California newspaper a...
Next to becoming the world champion, grandmaster is the ultimate summit for the competitive chess player. Out of the millions of chess players around the world, a little over 1500 current chess players have reached the height of grandmaster! ...
The regular readers of my column know that I hate political correctness. In my old article I explained it is probably the biggest threat to Western civilization. Very soon people will stop expressing their true beliefs out of fear that the...
Most amateurs run into the same problems: undefended pieces, being unaware of their opponents' best moves, falling victim to simple tactics, etc. Those things are common. However, once in a while you’ll see a player making one specific ...
One of the most important things in chess is willpower (a branch of chess psychology). Most players glance at a possibility, shrug it off as too risky or just plain bad or boring, and toss out some generic move instead. This, of course, is...
After sharing positional puzzles to the raging masses, I thought that it was only right to offer tactical puzzles and sharp attacks. However, there’s a tiny blip: All these games won brilliancy prizes. Anyway, whether you solve it or not,...
Welcome again to another learning chess experience. You will look at eight positional puzzles and, as you finish each one, you will click the question mark (“?”) underneath the board next to the light bulb. This will allow you to se...
In last week's article, we discussed chess players' behavior. The big questions were if trying to flag your opponent in a dead-drawn position or playing out a completely lost position or some other perfectly legal things are ethical. Judgin...
I’ve done positional puzzles twice. Since a lot of people enjoyed them, I’ve decided to do it again, and perhaps again and again. It’s certainly a good way to learn positional ideas. Here are the original two articles: ...
Not sure how to celebrate International Chess Day? Join thousands of other Chess.com users in our 24-hour arena from 12 a.m. PT to 12 p.m. July 20! The tournament will be played at Chess.com's most popular time control, 10|0. Play the Arena W...
I get so many questions and statements about chess, but being old (yep, 108 years old…don’t worry though, the friends that are still alive tell me that I don’t look more than 98) means that all those questions have been asked ov...
"We work 25 hours a day." "But there's only 24 hours in a day!" "We just wake up an hour earlier." —Eternal Call, a Soviet TV series (1973-83) Our society's obsession with time knows few bounds. It is the golden age of at...
The Chess.com member KBToys7 wrote: I am writing to you out of frustration. I’ve bought several books on chess; on openings, middle games, endgames, tactics, strategy and more. I’ve completed dozens of lessons offered here on Chess....
Note: The cover image was modified from that of a novel of that name written by John Donoghue. The story, set in Auschwitz, is much deeper and serious than this article. There has never been any doubt that chess ...
This series on Wilhelm Steinitz isn’t about every detail of his life. It’s about some basics and, most important, the games. I’m writing this since whenever chess players get together and talk about the past top players...
Note: The cover image was modified from that of a novel of that name written by John Donoghue. The story, set in Auschwitz, is much deeper and serious than this article. There has never been any doubt that chess ...
The 1860s were very good for Adolf Anderssen, who was still at his peak. He won several important tournaments and was also successful in most of his matches. However, new players were appearing, such as Ignatz von Kolisch, Steinitz, and Zukertort....
Adolf Anderssen (born 1818) was born in the German Empire (Breslau, which is now Wroclaw, Poland). He learned how to play chess at the age of nine, and learned much of his chess understanding by going over all the games of the legendary Labourdonn...