I'm the Head of Community for Chess.com. I earned the National Master title in 2012, and in 2014, I returned to my home state of South Carolina to start Strategery: Chess and Games. In late 2015, I began working for Chess.com and haven't looked back since.
You can find my personal content on Twitch , Twitter , and YouTube where I further indulge my love of chess.
I've been playing chess tournaments a long time. I've seen quite a lot. I've seen players sweep pieces from the board and storm out. I've seen fits and cursing at the board. I've seen all manner of rules disputes, and I've seen clock malfunctions ...
Chess pins are one of the most common tactics in chess, and they frequently decide games between beginning and intermediate players. At the grandmaster level, decisive pins are fairly rare. Today's video looks at one truly special type of pin tha...
Pins showcase the power of long-range pieces. In pins, not only is an opponent's piece directly under attack, also additional pieces and squares behind the pinned piece come under fire. Bishops, rooks, and queens can create pins - the most powerfu...
How many brilliant moves have been played in a single game in the Computer Chess Championship? According to Game Review, the answer is 18(!!) brilliant moves. This sacrificial duel was played by Stoofvlees and Halogen in a Richter-Rauzer, Sicili...
One of my goals in my Modern Masterpieces series is to be able to cover all classic topics with great recent games. If a student wants, my goal is that once published, you would be able to go through this entire series and feel like you had been e...
It's the oldest and greatest lament of the chess coach—CASTLE YOUR KING! Time and time again, young students fail to take advantage of the most valuable single move in chess! Castling is the only time you can move two pieces at once. In a si...
When the long-anticipated revival of Chess: The Musical on Broadway was confirmed—and confirmed with an utterly stellar cast in Lea Michelle, Nicholas Christopher, and Aaron Tveit—I knew I would have to make a trip to New York to see t...
It is one of the oldest chess prohibitions—and also one of the most frequently broken: Don't bring your queen out too early! The reason for its frequent breakage is clear. The queen is the most powerful piece—why shouldn't I use it as...
I LOVE efficiency in chess—when each move has a purpose, each piece fulfills a function, and everything is harmonious! Efficiency is rarely more important than in the opening. Both players start with zero development, and as the pieces race...
One of the most basic instincts of many first-time chess players is to push as many pawns as possible, as far as possible. A strong central pawn presence IS important, as we've already discussed, BUT every pawn move has two drawbacks: A pawn mov...
In the first video in our Modern Masterpieces series, we looked at the importance of controlling the center. It is the VERY FIRST thing you need to in a chess game. The claims you and your opponent stake on the center in the first few moves dictat...
Today, I'm doing something INCREDIBLY stupid... I'm launching a MASSIVE new series on my YouTube channel: "100+ Modern Positional Masterpieces Guaranteed To Improve Your Chess" My previous greatest effort on my blog and YouTube channel has been m...
As part of Chess.com's "My Best Game" series, I previously shared my win against IM Daniel Fernandez from back in 2005. Since I've played it, that game has always been my go to answer to the "What is your best game?" question every chess player ma...
Here is, in my opinion, the most brilliant game I've ever played. It is also an imperfect game that I could and arguably should have lost, but I love the struggle in the game, and in a sequence from move 17 to 20, I played three brilliant moves ac...
After I posted my blog about breaking 2500, I got a lot of requests to share the spreadsheet I used to track my results. While I don't think this been some big key for improvement for me, tracking my blitz games and reviewing the data has been a g...
After more than a decade of playing on Chess.com and grinding blitz, I reached 2500 blitz on Chess.com - a years-long goal of mine that I honestly long thought I might never reach! I started chess late - not playing a tournament until high school ...
Beauty in chess is all around us. Every day there are numerous brilliant moves played on Chess.com thousands of interesting blitz games between strong players, and tens of thousands of intriguing missed opportunities. Unfortunately, there are also...
Every chess player is inspired by the beautiful checkmating combinations of past masters. One of the things that got me hooked on chess was Fred Reinfeld's 1001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate (a great book if you are 1200 and don't check the solution...
This year, I was super fortunate to win my state chess championship for the second time. Things didn't look good as early as round two as though I started with a nice win (actually the first time I haven't lost in round one at the State Championsh...
Beating a grandmaster, should you manage it, is obviously a huge milestone for any chess player. These days youngsters are beating grandmasters at younger and younger ages with the current record being just eight years old. At 39 years old though,...
When did chess "arrive"? Was it when Alexander McDonnell and Louis De La Bourdonnais played their incredible match in the 1830s? Was it the first international chess tournament, organized by Howard Staunton in London in 1851? Was it when Paul Morp...
What is the first chess masterpiece ever played? Naturally one thinks of the games of Paul Morphy and Adolf Anderssen in the 1850s, and indeed some of the greatest masterpieces ever played such as the Opera Game, Immortal Game, and Evergreen Game,...
My one classical game with Hans Niemann was from the 2017 World Open. There we met in the 8th round, the penultimate round. He was rated a bit shy of 2300 FIDE, having reached the FIDE Master title about a year previously and having slid back a bi...
Draws get a famously unfair bad rap in chess. As is often noted, a perfectly played game of chess is a draw. Still, there are certainly draws that can be dry, unsymmetric, and uninteresting. It's also true that draws have a dramatic disadvantage i...
Johannes Zukertort was a protege of Wilhelm Steinitz, but for some time it seems as though he might surpass his mentor. The collegial rivalry between the two culminated in the first ever World Chess Championship in 1886. Zukertort could not have s...
