"Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before," quipped American actress Mae West in 1936. So it is with defending bad positions in chess. One cannot deny that in the majority of cases, the best way to test your opponent's techniq...
Professor: Hey, class. How’s it going? Hale: Great! Lucian: OK. Ryan: Terrific! Zephyr: It could be better. Professor: Wow, such ups and downs. Listening to you is like being in an elevator. Lucian: It beats g...
We have great news for Chess.com members today. Chess.com University is organizing its first online summer chess camp! This July, most likely from the 8th till 12th, we will have our 5-day long camp featuring tournaments, simuls, lectures, game a...
In this article, I will be discussing another archetypal Sicilian endgame. This one occurs after White occupies d5 with a knight which is then traded off and recaptured by exd5. This structure frequently arises from the Dragon, Accelera...
Every year in May, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chess Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina is organizing Individual national Youth and Junior Championship. This year organizer made event in Tuzla, nice city with chess tradition. By our rules in each cate...
The question in the title of the article might sound stupid. We are called Homo Sapiens for a reason: translated from Latin it means "Wise Man." By accumulating the knowledge of the previous generations, humankind has made tremendous progress in t...
Analysis of a recent game with a very interesting Novity: GM Blomqvist,E. Vs IM Smith A. (Sigeman Chess Tournament) 17-05-2014 Enjoy it! Francesco Bentivegna
Usually an article discusses a particular player, or tactics, or some positional concept. When I teach tactical motifs, you know that all the puzzles are going to be about tactics. If I am discussing a particular idea concerning a pawn structure, ...
"I am stuck at 1700. Does that make me studid?" "Is there a correlation between chess rating and IQ?" One of the world's leading physicists and expert on string theory is Ed Witten. Ed took up chess for a while and what was his rating? 1700. I d...
Professor: Welcome, class. Are you ready for some chess? Class: Yes we are, Professor. Professor: I thought today we’d take it easy and look at a few trouble-free problems, nothing special. With various tournaments coming up, it can’t hurt ...
Recently I've received a lot of emails from prospective students who ask me “How do I get better at chess?” In my opinion, there are three important methods of improvement that I feel are key to everyone's growth as chess players. This article wil...
In last week's article, we discussed how alcohol affects a chess player's abilities. There I mentioned the Soviet grandmaster Ratmir Dmitrievich Kholmov. I don't want the readers to have an impression that this great chess player was mostly famous...
In various lines of the Sicilian, Black plays ...a6 and ...b5, which sometimes gives White the chance to sacrifice a minor piece on b5. The knight that ends up on b5 subsequently captures on d6, the queens are traded, and a typical endgame arises....
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This week Chess.com celebrates its 7-year-anniversary, and we've got something for you! We're offering a 30% discount on our magazine The Master's Bulletin, which offers 40 pages each month with articles on openings, middlegame and endgame as well...
Professor: Good afternoon, class. I trust you’ve had an eventful week of chess. Lucian: I certainly did. I played tons of blitz at the Marshall Chess Club. Zephyr: I was busy studying. I read a section on open files in Jeremy Silm...
FIDE elections are getting closer, so it is time to revisit one of their "brilliant" inventions: the doping test. I briefly touched this absurd innovation here. No one has ever been able to prove that a mythical chess-enhancing drug even exists,...
In the Sicilian, we tend to think of the queenside as Black's domain. Black's open c-file, which allows real pressure on c2 as well as support for a knight on c4, along with the easy possibility of expanding on the queenside by ...b5, generally gi...
In modern tournaments, rule about arranged draw games or to don’t play draw under 30 or even 40 moves is one of the most controversial, but it helped to improve fight spirit in chess players. In last league, I played 1st board, and even in half o...
Recently, IM Jeremy Silman contributed an article featuring the talent of Ignatz Kolisch, one of the strongest, if not the strongest, player during the 1860s. Mr. Silman's article, Kolisch: Unknown Tactical Monster, demonstrated Kolis...
We have started our events, 8 players from Turkmenistan plays here. In the first round the USA player, Mr IM Justin Sarkar won against the Turkmeni IM Maksat Atabayev. www.firstsaturday.hu
Last week we looked at a structure that featured a central space advantage for White (two center pawns vs. Black's one) and a queenside pawn majority for Black. I discussed White’s most aggressive plan (a pawn sacrifice that creates a mobile...
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...
