Do you like to solve chess puzzles? It's a great way to work on your tactical skills. Do you do them fast, like in Puzzle Rush, or more deliberately to practice for classical games? Most strong players train with puzzles to help them learn and sta...
GM Ben Finegold is well known for his chess rules to live by, most famously, "never play f6." A black pawn almost never belongs on f6. It's dangerous for the black king and makes it hard to move other pieces on the kingside. Finegold teaching ...
In one of his games at the 1958 Chess Olympiad in Munich, GM Mikhail "the Magician" Tal, true to his style, sacrificed a pawn. His team member, then world champion GM Mikhail Botvinnik, asked him, "why did you sacrifice that pawn?" "It was in my w...
Few things rival the rush of finding a beautiful tactic on the board. Online or at the chess club, every player remembers the satisfaction of doing a great combination, the kind that makes you want to replay it again and again. But tactics aren&rs...
One of the greatest features of chess is that we can enjoy the games played decades or even hundreds of years ago. This is something very unique to chess. The best tennis rallies or soccer goals are completely lost for us if they happened before t...
Imagine a situation where your pawn has reached the seventh rank, just one square away from fulfilling its dream of becoming a queen. However, none other than the opponent's king steps in front of the pawn, preventing its promotion. Who is going t...
Have you ever played a brilliant move in one of your games? How about more than one? They're hard to find, so it's difficult to score several in a game. However, there's one tactical trick that's likely to let you stack up multiple brilliant moves...
Recently, WGM Maria Manakova posted an interesting position on her Facebook page. She wrote: "A fun puzzle for third or forth category players." According to the old Soviet chess classification, it refers to people with a US Chess rating somewhere...
Everyone has a favorite chess tactic. Maybe you're a big fan of the fork. Or maybe you spend your nights vainly searching for discovered checks. But what if I told you there was a chess tactic that never fails, succeeds way more than you'd think...
If you like watching chess videos on YouTube, you couldn't possibly miss the catchy phrase, "Do you even rook lift, bro?" I don't know who came up with this meme, but no doubt a huge credit goes to IM Eric Rosen, who made it popular. Of course, ...
Over 1.5 million (and counting) users have made the Chess.com Daily Puzzle a part of their daily chess routine. As the Daily Puzzle curator, I aim to excite, challenge, and sharpen your puzzle-solving skills. In this article, we'll focus on tips t...
I don't like popular disputes where people compare legendary champions from the past to modern players. In my opinion, such discussions are silly and pointless. Besides, there is no way to prove your opinion is right or wrong. That's why I just sm...
The 2024 Champions Chess Tour Finals was an exciting event with many thrilling encounters, combinations, and blunders: everything chess spectators love to watch. In this smorgasbord of "tasty" chess, you could easily miss the following one: Wh...
In his book The Game Of Chess, Siegbert Tarrasch, one of the greatest players of his time, famously said: "It is not enough to be a good player, you must also play well." Indeed, all great tournament results, ratings, and titles boil down to a sim...
If the title of this article made you think that it is another showcase of GM Mikhail Tal's magic, you would be wrong. Today, we are going to talk about a brilliant player from the past who is partially forgotten or at least not as well known as o...
Have you ever played against a grandmaster in a chess game? How long did you survive? If you lasted more than than 12 moves, then you did better than former world champion GM Anatoly Karpov in his roughest game, against GM Larry Christiansen. See ...
Recently I was explaining a concept of a chess X-ray to one of my students. I don't need to do it too often since surprisingly, most chess players, even quite inexperienced ones, know about it. So, I described chess X-rays as a situation where a...
The news of the Argentinian prodigy Faustino Oro becoming the youngest IM ever at the tender age of 10 made headlines worldwide. Faustino plays an attractive, aggressive kind of chess, and those of you who want to get better can learn a lot from h...
We've all been there. You are happily solving some puzzles on Chess.com, feeling good, rattling off forced checkmates and snappy tactics, and then %*&$—you get that dreaded, red "X." What?! How could your solution not be right?! That was...
When I was just starting in chess, our chess club's team went to participate in one of the national competitions. Here I need to mention that unlike the U.S. Nationals, open to anyone who knows how to move pieces, the Soviet Nationals were highly ...
Every chess player wants to play a brilliant move. But how do you know if a move is brilliant, and how can you find it in your own games? This article will tell you exactly what Game Review looks for in determining brilliant moves and offers some ...
There are three things you can watch forever: fire burning, water falling, and movies with Sir Anthony Hopkins. The psychological thriller "Fracture" was a big blockbuster in 2007. A very smart screenplay coupled with brilliant performances by Ant...
Many people who just started playing chess ask what games they should study in order to improve their skills. It is tempting to study games played by the highest-rated player in history, GM Magnus Carlsen, but this can be really counterproductive,...
When I was 11, my home city hosted the First League of the Soviet Championship. For chess players who weren't alive at that time, it is absolutely impossible to understand the importance of such an event for local players. These days you can wat...
In his book Positional Decision Making in Chess, GM Boris Gelfand describes how excited he got as a boy when his father brought home a new chess book, a collection of the games of Akiba Rubinstein. He read the book cover-to-cover and immediately s...
