A Chess.com reader recently recommended a game where White (a 2700 grandmaster) made use of an interesting maneuver he (the reader) had never seen before. After seeing the sequence below, many questions may arise, and one might be left wonderin...
Bobby Fischer played 1st board for the US in four chess Olympiads, the final one being Siegen in 1970. In 1972, after beating Spassky, the first major event he skipped (and never played again!) was that summer's Olympiad in Skopje. Fischer also p...
My first wife, Susan Hollis (Holly) Bloom Heisman, passed away of breast cancer in Oct 1994. Among her social work jobs had been working with battered wives and runaway teens. She also did extensive volunteering for the American Cancer Society (I ...
People get excited by many different things. Some swoon over a good beer, others are into cars, and many live for sports. As a chess nerd, I and most experienced players go crazy over advanced holes (central holes are the most prized. From White’s...
(I want to thank chess.com’s finest chess historian, batgirl, for articles shared, the photos you see in this article, and her very useful feedback when I asked her about Kolisch. If you don’t follow her blogs and articles you are foolishly depriv...
Metropolitan Chess, Inc., a Los Angeles based-company, has just published its first book under the imprint Metropolitan Chess Publishing: Modernized: The King's Indian Defense by GM Dejan Bojkov GM Bojkov is probably ve...
In life, improvement is usually achieved by proceeding along the triangle "->Learn->Practice->Test->". In chess, this is "->Study->Play->Get Feedback->". Leave something out of the loop and you get diminishing returns. Thi...
S T A L E M A T E _______________________________________________________ The existing rule has this in its favour, that it appeals strongly to the sporting instincts of mankind; and the last chance which it affords to a player who appear...
The 2014 Bill Wright Saint Louis Open, held April 11-13, 2014, was a typical boring weekend swiss, where the one GM, me, was certain to take first place over a few select "experts" in a tournament with small prizes. Oh wait, that's not right at al...
Today we’ll look at three games and one comment. Each entry has important instructive points that are well worth pondering. We’ll start with the comment, alluding to my article, You Have It He Doesn’t! Part 1, which was all about...
On the TV show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" the contestant lets it be known that he wants to stick with his answer by stating "Final answer!" Similarly, an over-the-board chess player commits when he intentionally touches a piece (have to move...
"What's the going rate for selling 100 rating points?" Let's start with "It's illegal and I wouldn't do it, and neither should you or anyone else!" Now that we got that out of the way, I can then state "Interesting question! I've never had that o...
Let's summarize: 1) Every titled player in the world earned the honor by playing games averaging over 5 hours in length. 2) Playing long games on the internet is great practice for real in-person events. 3) Online chess servers do run automated...
In Part Six of this seven-part series, we saw Alekhine lose the World Championship to Max Euwe in 1935, only to win it back in 1937. After shocking the world (and Euwe, who was sure he would finish Alekhine off once and for all) with that ep...
Most tournament players scoff at the notion of Coffeehouse Chess. Even so, some of the most famous brilliancies in chess history were produced under dubious, non-tournament circumstances: The Immortal Game (Anderssen-Kieseritzky) was played at the...
For the second time in two years I decided to visit the Reykjavik Open tournament in Iceland – not to play chess, but to watch it, and enjoy the country’s hospitality and natural wonders. Last year, I didn’t have enough time to see any glaciers o...
"How can I tell if a chess book is too advanced for me?" Excellent question. Often you can't! Even books' suggested reading levels (eg by rating) are often misleading, partly because the publisher wants to sell books, not exclude readers who migh...
In Part One of Riding The Winds Of Fashion, I talked about the Hübner Variation of the Nimzo-Indian and how, at one time, it was one of the most fashionable openings in the world. In the main example (Bruce Leverett – Silman, National O...
When choosing an opening system, it’s important to pick something that is within your skill set, suits your style, and makes you feel excited whenever it appears on the board. You can pick an all-gambit repertoire (it might not be completely...
"If I play for a legal trap and it doesn't work, can I still have a good game?" Sounds like you might be a lawyer (or need to consult one)! This is also a good example of how I need to "interpret" questions on my Q&A show. Since the questio...
Dear Ask-a-Chess-Openings-Expert, My husband and I were planning on taking a trip next month to Hawaii for our 25th wedding anniversary, but my mother refuses to watch the kids ever since Timmy put her cat in the refrigerator. Bill, my husband...
As we saw, Alekhine reached his ultimate prime in 1930 and 1931. For a few years after that, he was still clearly the world’s best player, but the march of time and the wrath of alcohol took more and more out of him - though everyone still v...
I was interested in finding open-source chess tools for analysis, study and preparation. Last time I checked, I wasn't too excited, but this time I am happy to find about SCID. SCID is an open-source chess database that has a lot of the options av...
About a year and a half ago, I had the honor of working with GM Yasser Seirawan for two days during his visit to the Bay Area. Yasser is a four-time U.S. Champion whose storied professional career spans more than 30 years, and he also possesses th...
