Enjoying Other Bloggers' Blogs!

Update 8-18-19: Annotated game included.

How do you keep up with the wide range of great chess content available online? 

Back when I was a professional chess player, I would be very eager to stay 'up to date' with the latest games, including the latest news stories and articles that had been written. At some point it was even an addiction, where I had taken a good habit too far...much like someone who checks their Facebook feed too much!  

What I do now, is go through the Chess.com Top Blogs every couple of weeks, and make a note of nice examples, posts and lessons. 

Since I am doing this anyway...why not share the highlights with my readers too?

Of course, every Top Blogger on Chess.com is there for a reason, so this post is more about what made the greatest impression on me, rather than what are the 'best posts' per se.

First, I was particularly impressed by Kalamakanta's recent posts, which have a large number of nicely annotated games, many of which are particularly beautiful, striking and instructive! It was from his post on Magic in Chess that I remembered the following brilliancy, which I share in my latest video:

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You can also play through detailed notes of the full game below, which covers a few extra alternatives compared to the video. Thank you to Kalamakanta for sharing these annotations with me!

I'd like to thank Sam Copeland for sharing with me how to set up the above red link - I greatly appreciate it! I also greatly appreciate his posts, where he writes nice annotations to Grandmaster games, and also presents them in video format. This post on Anand's brilliant win vs. Bologan is just one good example. 

I also noticed that, much like IM Christopher Yoo, IM Aditya Mittal is another young player with a talent for chess composition! His endgame studies will certainly get you thinking - click this link to join the discussion on his latest endgame study. 

Although I don't speak any Spanish, I quite liked the post by Jose Manuel Lopez Nieto, which is one of the clearest demonstrations of key rook endgames that I have seen recently. It's well worth translating and reading for yourself, if you aren't sure how to handle rook endgames such as the one below, with Black to move: 

Do you see the mate in 7 for White? Check out introuble2's post here to relive a very exciting time in chess history, and see the answer to the above puzzle  

That's my summary of the Chess.com posts published in July thus far! Thanks for reading, and if you liked this post, you're going to love my other posts  

GM Max Illingworth

August 17, 2019