Any chess player has surely won with and lost at least one game to the most famous fast checkmate, Scholar's Mate: When younger, we used to call this the "four move knockout", and delighted in beating unsuspecting players with it. At the time...
We saw last time that, everything else equal, playing with the white pieces gives you an advantage of a few percentage points. Although I expected to see an advantage to white in master play, I was surprised to see the advantage show up so strongl...
Do you play the game or do you play the rating? I always try to play in focus mode on chess.com so that I'm not intimidated or otherwise affected by my opponent's rating. In "How to Reassess Your Chess", IM Jeremy Silman discusses "rating fear": ...
I recently coded a PGN to FEN parsing program, and discovered some pitfalls disambiguating pieces. The destination square is clearly defined by algebraic notation, but the origin of the move is not. Frequently, there's only one piece available tha...
