With the last few articles we studied Magnus Carlsen's comments after the games from the recent London Classic and analyzed the ones that had to do with intuitive approach towards the position. Today I would like to concentrate of some of the posi...
William Ewart Napier was born in England on January 17, 1881. His family soon moved to the United States, and because they did American chess has been all the richer. Napier first played correspondence chess, participating in one of the Continenta...
In the last week's article I touched the subject of cheaters who use computer engines during their games. To my great surprise, judging by reader's messages, many of you are not aware of this problem. I was asked how can cheaters possibly us...
Last August I wrote an article called "The Knight's Moves", about superhuman (or rather, "superequine") knights which travel the board with amazing activity. But more often a powerful knight takes the form of a "permanent knight" - a knight entren...
Sometimes this GM wishes he wasn´t a chess player at all....  But 19 year old Robin Van Kampen from the Netherlands always has the spirit to get back in the game, and he finds chess to be something that teaches him lessons in real life. He had t...
Today's article features a fighting game between Nakamura and Carlsen from the recent London Classic tournament. We will concentrate on few critical moments where intuition played a key role and explore how these two strong players with different ...
This week we’ll take a look at the extremely important concept of Double Attack, in which one piece attacks two enemy pieces at the same time (that’s the definition championed by Martin Weteschnik in his magnificent book, CHESS TACTICS FROM SCRATC...
This week I will be analyzing the well-known book by Alexander Kotov, Think Like a Grandmaster. This was the first part of a three-part series - the other two books being Play Like a Grandmaster and Train Like a Grandmaster. Kotov - and this boo...
There is no doubt that providing that you know how to use a chess engine and well aware of its shortcomings (like for example the Capablanca's position that we discussed in the previous part of this article), then you have an amazing learning tool...
. A discovered attack is a very common, and often very strong, combinative strike based on one piece getting out of the way and allowing a connection to occur that, ideally, leads to a decisive gain in material. Here's a very basic example: ...
   At the beginning of the show I suggested that more questions that were "position oriented" could be suggested, such as how to solve puzzles, analyze positions, problems that viewers had with positions, etc. Thankfully the viewers complied, an...
Today we continue with the topic of Intuition and will look at few moments from the Adams - Carlsen game at the recent London Chess Classic. The game did not go well for Carlsen, as Adams had the initiative throughout the opening, middlegame and m...
The first two parts of this article generated many comments from our readers so let me address a couple of popular misconceptions. First of all, the goal of this article is not to find out who plays chess better, computers or human players. This...
Recently while teaching chess, the following position occurred in a tournament game that a student was showing me. The student was Black and his opponent had just played 1.Nd5. He said "I think if I traded knights I would actually be losing." ...
On Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013, I returned to my old stomping ground in San Francisco: The Mechanics’ Institute Chess Club. The first thing my visit to San Francisco did was reaffirm Mark Twain’s old comment, “The coldest winter I eve...
The next several articles will be dedicated to the topic of Intuition. What is intuition in chess? It is a concept, hard to define and there can be endless debates about whether a certain decision is intuitive or not. Nevertheless, it is useful to...
I will be reviewing one of the most influential books I had early on in my chess development. This is an excellent book by grandmaster John Nunn and Peter Griffiths. Secrets of Grandmaster Play is at once a best games collection (all of the game...
In last week's article, we looked at a very interesting phenomenon of computer chess - the "horizon effect." Basically it is a computer's inability in certain situations to see the future no matter how fast its processor is or how many plys it can...
I haven't featured a Karpov game in quite a while, so here goes... On his eleventh move, his opponent (Velimirovic) either decides to sacrifice his queen or commits an oversight. Still, there is work to be done for the full point, and Karpov is a...
One of the final questions on today's show was "What do you consider the game in chess history that, if I study, I will learn the most?" (I paraphrase) This question raises three important issues: An unannotated "pure" game is only worth what th...
This article concludes our series on Key Positions! Last time, we studied how strong players from the past sacrificed pawns positionally. Really what we looked at was one strategic method out of numerous methods used by strong players to achieve g...
We'll finish up our study of forks by looking at Bishop, Queen, Rook, and even King forks. Instead of waxing poetic, I'll just jump right to the puzzles since, by now, I expect all of you to be fork experts. As always, make sure to look at the h...
Computers are an essential part of the modern world and it is impossible even to imagine our everyday life without them. As a matter of fact, you wouldn't be able to read this article if there were no computers and the miracle called "Internet". B...
Recently, a friend sent me a fantastically crazy game, and I have decided to share it in my column. It was a fairly obscure game, from the Beverwijk tournament of 1961. The position that arose was so incredibly lopsided that it is hard to believe....
