James Dong asked:I was wondering whether you would give your views on the Bxf7 sacrifice variation in the Ruy Lopez Norwegian Defence? I consider myself an aggressive player and would like to add this to my repertoire as it is very interesting. ...
If your opponent commits chess "crimes", they need to punished. Sometimes the "trial" is long and the execution takes place in the endgame. Sometimes the crimes are misdemeanors and, if your opponent plays well after the crime, they are expunged...
I know that all of you are already familiar with the great power of the development, especially guys who like to play gambit lines, yet still there are lot of players who are going for the material because they think that they can defend themselve...
Last week we discussed the dangerous diagonal 'a5-e1'. Today we are going to talk about the most dangerous file. I think no other file can claim even a half of the number of Kings killed on the 'h' file. This is not a big surprise since the Rh1 ...
It was July 2007 and I was playing casually some chess at Playchess.com, when, unexpectedly, my game formula matched me to play a game with the handle called Raffael, which was currently the top blitz player in the honorary list. Well-known by all...
This article will deviate a little from the exchange topic. I would like to address the topic of outposts. An outpost is a square, usually on the opponent’s side of the board that is attacked by our pawn but cannot be protected by the opponent’s p...
When you are analyzing a combination during a game, sometimes your first go at it makes it seem as though it won't work. Many chess books about tactics suggest that you then reverse the order of the moves in the combination to see if that helps. ...
People have plenty of choices in an opening. Some choose to play the dynamic and well analysed main variations, while some choose to play subtle yet promising side line and others choose to play some razor sharp surprise gambits like the ones we s...
Today we will see one of the most beautiful Dutch defence games ever played. The winner Savielly Tartakower (1887-1956) was born at Rostov-on-Don in 1887. His native language was Russian, but he was a subject of Austria-Hungary, and in World War I...
In my last two articles, I showed two of my games from the Quebec Invitational in Montreal. With this article, I hope to wrap up the tournament with my last round game as black against GM Mark Bluvshtein. Going into the game, Mark was in clear fi...
Anonymous asked:I thought chess was supposed to be a gentleman’s game, but at times my opponents act rudely during tournament play. What can I do about this?Dear Anonymous:During a tournament in Los Angeles, two players got into a fight while play...
Sometimes a game comes down to which player can see further ahead. After dodging a bullet in the middlegame (where he almost loses a rook after initiating a combination), White finds himself in situation where he has to see as many as ten dangero...
The subject of today's discussion was inspired by your comments, my dear readers. So let me thank you again for your comments and suggestions. Last week one of the readers suggested an article about long diagonals (a1-h8 and a8-h1). Actually we h...
Game 1: Siege, Standoff, and Strike In the first game of the Leningrad Dutch (A84) series, we will see a positional struggle between Chess.com members fcpanginen and albatros1 turn into an all-out 7th rank invasion. The game follows a non-mainli...
Alexei Shirov was born on July 4, 1972 in Riga, Latvia. He is known as an attacking player. Mikhail Tal said the young Shirov was not inferior to Tal in the calculation of complications. Shirov was the World Champion U-16 in 1988. In 1988, Shirov ...
For those of you who are new to chess.com or for those of you who have enjoyed any of my articles in the past, I decided to post a list of links to all of my previous articles. There have been 19 to date, this being the 20th. Title Date Pu...
I sit in a room without air-condition on the top floor of a building. It gets pretty hot, since the outside temperature is rather high, plus the roof is conducting heat. Being helpless in a given situation I ended up in makes me think in chess ter...
Sometimes you read about a neat trap in a book and you try to play it, but no one ever plays the right moves. Either they know about it and avoid it, or they don't know about it and accidentally avoid it. But sometimes they fall right into it. ...
Today we will take a look into another uncommon opening, The Icelandic Gambit. Even though this variation is not as sharp as the Kings Gambit opening that we studied a couple of weeks ago, this opening has its own sharp pit falls. Personally I (Ma...
I know that its much more interesting to study wild attacks then the stubborn defense. I am an attacker who likes to attack even if I see that my combinations are dubious, and I won a countless of times even though I find refutation for my combina...
In his moment, Akiba Rubinstein (1882-1961) played the most perfect chess of the epoch! Many of his games were models of precision. He played the endgames like the gods! said Tartakower, a leading master at the time. Before World War I, Rubinstein...
I'm definitely a candidate for "most excited that chess.com added chess960." I remember when I first joined the team in January, Erik and Jay asked what ideas I had about the future development of chess and chess.com. I told them that in my opinio...
In this game, Black falters in the opening a little, but recovers in time to get to an endgame without too much damage. Just when it looks like we're in for one of those long rook endgames where both sides are trying to play offense and defense a...
I'm definitely a candidate for "most excited that chess.com added chess960." I remember when I first joined the team in January, Erik and Jay asked what ideas I had about the future development of chess and chess.com. I told them that in my opinio...
