I'm the VP of Chess and 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 2014, 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.
Mikhail Tal's prize-winning victory over Vasily Smyslov in the 1959 Candidates' tournament was something of a passing of the torch. Smyslov had played three world chess championship matches against Mikhail Botvinnik in the 50's and stood as Botvin...
Bobby Fischer's Game of the Century is widely considered one of the greatest chess games of all time. The 13-year-old Bobby had recently, in his own words, "got good," and with this game he announced his talent to the world. The game was publici...
Gyula Breyer was a tremendously promising player and one of the leaders of the hypermodern school of chess. He passed away at a young age (28) in 1921 when he was at the height of his powers. Just one year prior he had won one of the biggest chess...
Mikhail Tal offered many audacious and quite a few suspicious queen sacrifices in his dramatic career. One of his finest, and probably soundest, queen sacrifices was his 1958 offering against Milko Bobotsov. Tal immediately picked up two minor p...
In my newest "Every Move Explained" video, I break down the first world chess champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, most famous game. Steinitz gets a bit of a bad rap. He never dazzled the world like Paul Morphy, and by the time Lasker came along, he prov...
The Hungarian attacking chess master, Rudolf Charousek, may have been the last great romantic chess player. His swashbuckling style, prone to the King's Gambit and general recklessness, was already out of place in the 1890's, but he used this styl...
To my mind, the most typically "Tal" of Tal's games is his 1957 training game against his longtime trainer and friend, Alexander Koblents. You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide e...
Adolf Anderssen's Evergreen Game is one of the most celebrated chess games ever played. In it, Anderssen used the Evan's Gambit to seize a large initiative and overwhelm his uncastled opponent, Jean Dufresne, with an amazing combination! The gam...
GM Vugar Gashimov was a tremendously creative and strong chess player who reached the world's top ten in the 2000s. I enjoyed watching him play on ICC and was inspired to see him play the Benoni at the highest level. Sadly, Gashimov's career was...
In his first Soviet Championship, Tal won a special prize for his game against Lev Aronin. In classic Tal fashion, he rejects simple lines and drives aggressively forward on the kingside. Just as it seems Tal's attack might stall, he amps up the...
Edward Lasker was a great chess writer (and a go chess writer) and chess player who won five U.S. Open Championships and was awarded the IM title by FIDE. He was also a distant cousin (and good friend) of the World Champion Emanuel Lasker. Togethe...
Name a chess player who... was born in 1944 died in 2008 at the age of 64 peaked spectacularly in the 1970s and left chess in the same decade battled improperly treated mental illness for the last decades of his life You would be almost ...
In 1957, Tal won his first Soviet Chess Championship. In the process, he won multiple brilliancies, including the following one against future-GM Gurgenidze. Tal employs his trusty Benoni Defense, an opening he nearly invented at the top-level, ...
I first saw Paul Morphy's Opera Game as a young aspiring chess player avidly devouring chess books from the library and learning that this game was deeper than I imagined - MUCH deeper. I'm not entirely sure which book first presented the game (ma...
Prince Andrey Dadian of Mingrelia (good name) is one of my favorite historical figures. An actual prince from the actual province of Mingrelia (a part of modern Georgia and not depicted in either "Duck Soup" or the "Princess Diaries"), Dadian was ...
In his first Soviet Chess Championship, Mikhail Tal scored 10.5/17 and tied for fifth place - an excellent showing for a 19-year-old; however, the next year he would radically improve his score and win his first of a record six Soviet Championship...
Surely every chess player has a favorite Mikhail Tal game. Mine is Tal's 1981 victory over Janos Flesch! Although Tal's victory over Flesch occurs exactly 20 years after he lost the World Championship title back to Botvinnik, the energy and imag...
Anand's 2006 victory over Sergey Karjakin was deemed by many an "Immortal Game" when it was played, but in 2013, Anand topped himself. His win over Levon Aronian in Tata Steel was universally deemed an instant classic, and many consider it his bes...
Mikhail Tal's health problems plagued his career. In reading his biography, it often seems he was in the hospital as often as he was in the tournament hall, and being escorted from one venue to the other was not uncommon for Tal. In 1969, Tal ha...
Today, Magnus Carlsen has established the highest recorded chess rating of all time and twice defeated Viswanathan Anand in world championship matches, but in 2007, he was still a prodigy, and Anand won powerfully in their first two decisive games...
Viswanathan Anand has plenty of brilliancies to his credit, but one game that looked likely to be his greatest brilliancy slipped away at the critical moment. Playing Ivan Sokolov, Anand sacrificed a queen with the thrilling 21.Qxg4!! The sacrif...
Most simul games are hack and slash affairs which pose little risk to the master who quickly punishes tactical errors from his amateur opponent. Tal's simul game from 1988 against Jack Miller initially goes according to script as a quick Bxf7+ net...
Paul Morphy is the chess player we all wish we could be. After effortlessly outdeveloping and outplaying his opponents, he regularly finishes with clean sacrifices and beautiful checkmates. It helps of course that Morphy was literally hundreds of ...
Mikhail Tal once said the happiest day of his life was the day he lost to Rashid Nezhmetdinov. What was this miraculous game that so inspired Tal and who was Rashid Nezhmetdinov? Nezhmetdinov is a fascinating figure in chess history. A five-time...
