I would like to thank all my readers for their comments. This feedback helps me to determine what would be the most interesting subject for my coming articles. Today I would like to answer some of your questions and requests. Due to the space limi...
Some time ago one of my students told me that it is hard to find rook moves that do not capture the opponent's rook but rather put it in close proximity to the enemy rook. The examples of white playing Ra7 when black’s rook is on a8 came to my min...
INSTRUCTIONS: The following is a game designed to test some of your chess skills, including: opening knowledge, positional understanding, tactical sight, and endgame know-how. The idea is to play through the moves below belonging to an annota...
The king's gambit is a fascinating opening that has been in practice for more than four hundred years in chess history. If you try searching for King's gambit games in your database you will start seeing games starting from the early 16th century....
About Chess Ratings by Bruce Till The United States Chess Federation (USCF) has instituted a rating system for chess players which allows them to know their relative strength among other rated players, as well as facilitating the pairin...
When I was writing my last article about brilliancy prizes, I remembered the observation made by Alekhine about his two best games. “I consider this (Reti-Alekhine, Baden-Baden 1925) and the game against Bogoljubow at Hastings, 1922, the most ...
In this article, we're going to take a look inside the winner's toolbox. Some of these items are absolutely essential to have, or you will lose games that you shouldn't have lost. Not having these skills in your toolbox would be like a carpenter...
Grandmaster Chess: The book of the Louis B. Statham Lone Pine Masters-plus Tournament 1975By GM Isaac Kashdan and the Staff of California Chess Reporter (Jude Acers, Robert Burger, Dennis Fritzinger, Guthrie McClain)Ishi Press 2009 (ISBN:978-0-92...
Okay I admit it, I have guilty pleasures. I like to eat ice cream in the middle of the knight, I secretly drink all of our Pepsi. But my biggest confession is that I love draws. Draws by repitition are better than winning at times. I just love mes...
By Bruce Till You study. You play at the club. You play on the internet. You play against a chess computer. You play in tournaments. You buy more books (maybe you even read some of them). You try new openings. You study endgames. But your ...
My normal weapon as Black against 1.e4 has been the French Defense for many years. A couple years ago, I started playing the Ruy Lopez as Black as well, but I still tend to choose the French against lower-rated opponents. Unlike the Ruy Lopez wher...
What is "Learning by Induction"? Simply put, it is learning by watching. You watch what others do, then you do that. Below is a more formal explanation of inductive vs. deductive logic: In logic, we often refer to the two broad methods of...
Anon asked:I’m a fairly new player with a low rating. My first question addresses the person who asked whether becoming a world class player at the age of 44 was out of the question and Andrew replied yes, it is; how about 21? I’ve bought some tac...
Many people don't consider chess to be a team sport. And this opinion has its reasons. Chess is a game between two people. There are no assistants, only you and your opponent. So a team match can also be viewed as a few separate confrontations. Wh...
First of all, let me thank you my dear readers for your positive response for my "Typical patterns everyone should know" articles. It shows that you want me to continue our discussion of this important subject. Today's installment is devoted to '...
History The Vienna Game was originally called Hamppe's Game after Carl Hamppe (1815-1876) and took its current name in the 1890's due to its ongoing popularity in Vienna, for centuries the capital of the Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. A...
Milko Popchev of Bulgaria was born in 1964. He became an international grandmaster in 1998. Nikola Nestorovic of Serbia was born in 1989. Since this game was played, he became an international master. The tournament was at Stara Pazova in Serbia d...
The Blackmar-Diemer Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.e4) can be a bit scary. White generally gets a strong attack in the main line. In this article, I explore a more confrontational approach. After 2...dxe4 3.Nc3, Black can play the opening blast 3...e5!? and ob...
Many players work hard to develop a useful defense to the Ruy Lopez. There are many varieties of the Spanish, many of them complicated with theory running more than 20 moves. In this article I show some ideas in the old-fashioned classical lines. ...
I would like to address the question of exchanges in endgames. Unlike middlegames, having a material advantage in endgames almost always leads to winning positions. There are different methods of converting either positional or material advantages...
When I was a kid, PCs weren’t that widespread yet, so books were our #1 choice when it came to chess studies. Of course, innovative technologies speed up the process of learning chess, but the old methods shouldn’t be totally neglected too. That’s...
Welcome back to the continuation of our study of the latest developments in the Queen's Indian defense pawn sacrifice variation. Last week we saw white bulldozing his way through black's defenses with this newly found pawn sacrifice idea. Now it i...
Why has chess survived the test of time? Because in addition to the enjoyment created by competing and winning, whether it be a match, a master title, or an important prize, it also has the ability to please us when we reproduce and play over beau...
Here is a game from the 2009 Copper State Open, IM Ginsburg - WFM Cardona with full annotations and commentary: This was a nice game to observe as it shows a common theme in chess. The b7 and b2 squares for both sides can be a sens...
