Hou Yifan, the youngest women’s world champion in history, tells David Cox about her journey to become one of the strongest female players of all time. Find out her thoughts on a "battle of the sexes" match against Magnus Carlsen, and why sh...
The updated standings and leaderboard information for Arena Kings season five are below. You can read the season five announcement here for complete details. Season Recap: Beginning on September 16, Arena Kings was back for ...
Siegbert Tarrasch was one of the best players of his time and definitely deserves to be included in the list of strongest chess players who never became world champion. Tarrasch. Photo via Wikipedia. Just like Reuben Fine, Tarrasch wa...
Television fans enjoyed the Emmys on Sunday night, and the shows Game of Thrones and Fleabag dominated the awards for primetime TV. Today, another audiovisual medium takes the stage. The world of chess streaming has been growing q...
Pal Benko was born July 15, 1928 and died August 25, 2019 at the age of 91. Instead of throwing endless games at you (okay, okay…I will throw you a lot of games), I first want you to understand Benko’s personality and who Benko r...
Football is sometimes called "chess on the gridiron." And by sometimes, I mean I just called it that. But the game is actually often compared to war, which is the most common metaphor for chess. And if football is war, the quarterback is the fie...
I bet you've heard the cliche that "chess is 99 percent tactics" thousands of times. While it is greatly overused and exaggerated to some degree, overall it is correct. The enormous strength of modern computers is based on their unmatched abilit...
Get your reading glasses out for this article! The number of books written about chess is tremendous. While that can be great for the chess world, it poses practical issues for many fans. Most chess players have their own favorites, but how do y...
Ask any chess player to name a grandmaster who deserved to be the world champion but never became one, and you will get a list of the usual suspects. Bronstein, Korchnoi and Keres will be on the top of the list, and then it becomes ver...
Do you remember the day you joined Chess.com? At first, it could all seem a little overwhelming (so many features and options!), but you gradually got the hang of it. Suddenly, you realized that Chess.com had become like your second home, where yo...
In the end of 1984, the leading Soviet magazine Chess In The USSR published a big article about the first game of the world championship match Capablanca-Alekhine, Buenos Aires 1927. The author, master V. Goldin (no relation the U.S. grandmaster...
What is a pawn structure? From my online glossary, I define it as “the positioning of the whole pawn mass. Also referred to as the pawn skeleton. This positioning of the pawns is what usually dictates the types of plans available...
Reminder: Deadline for entries is 5:59 p.m. Pacific time September 2. The biggest event in online chess is back for 2019, and the field of 16 grandmasters is set for the 2019 Speed Chess Championship beginning September 2 at 6 p.m. PDT. W...
The concept of time in chess is one of the most difficult topics for young kids to grasp. While they have no trouble understanding how you can lose a piece, a pawn or the right to castle, the subject of losing time is usually confusing for them. ...
NM Bojan Lukajic's (@lasker_fiverr) notes on Chess.com are an incredible testament to the affection and appreciation of his students. Probably no coach on Chess.com has so impressed his students with such dedication and effort. NM Lukajic truly ca...
If you have seen the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, you may remember one of the Washington Square Park hustlers who held a sign offering a photograph or a game with the man who beat Mikhail Tal. Just like most of the movie's chess...
When we talk about blitz chess, we usually think about tactics, blunders and opening surprises that force our opponents to spend their precious seconds. I doubt that many people would mention good endgame technique as an integral element of b...
Do you want to learn an excellent and diverse opening without a lot of theory? IM Keaton Kiewra teaches the course for you! The Trompowsky Attack (1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5) is an excellent try for an advantage that can easily throw Black into shark-infest...
At one time there were no official titles in chess. In 1950 FIDE created the Grandmaster, the International Master and the International Women Master titles. The first two sets of titles weren't based on rating...
I am sure that you've encountered the situation where your opponent played an opening move that breaks all known chess rules. What is your second thought when this happens? (I assume that the first thought is usually: "You gotta be kidding me!")...
In December 2017 the company Deep Mind took the chess world by storm when they announced that their new engine, AlphaZero had decisively won a match against the previous top engine in the world, Stockfish. Join IM Danny Rensch as he analyzes key g...
Making forecasts is not one of my best skills. Actually it is quite the opposite: Usually my predictions of the future are quite bad. Yet one of my forecasts was a no-brainer, since I couldn't possibly have gone wrong with it. Almost four ...
What is pawn structure? From my online glossary, I define it as "the positioning of the whole pawn mass. Also referred to as the pawn skeleton. This positioning of the pawns is what usually dictates the types of plans available in a gi...
Are you looking to participate in a community league? Community Leagues provide great opportunities to represent your nation, state, city and communities in many different types of chess, including daily chess, vote chess, live chess formats, an...
