A month ago, I had the privilege to play for my club, "Asnières – Le Grand Echiquier", at the European Chess Club Cup that took place in Austria, and now I have finally found the time to write about this unique experience. It starte...
About two months ago the 2021/22 season of the French team championship have come to an end. It was running from October 2021 to mid-May 2022. I have moved to France in August 2021 and one of the first things I did was signing up for a chess clu...
Last weekend the finals of the 2022 French Chess Cup (Coupe de France) took place in Paris. The Cup is a knockout-style competition with the teams made up of four players. It ran from October 2021 to the end of May 2022 and involved about a hundre...
Two weeks ago, I played in a small tournament in Tours, a historical town in the Loire Valley. It was organized by the local chess club, L'Echiquier Tourangeau, during the Easter weekend. I did not play in an individual tournament with a classical...
Exactly 70 years ago, during the Easter holidays of 1952, David Bronstein and Mark Taimanov created quite a commotion by travelling all the way from the Soviet Union to United Kingdom to play in what was essentially an amateur students competition...
During my work on Smyslov biography I am reading tons of old chess journals and sometimes I come across exciting games that are completely forgotten. I decided to share one of them example. Earlier this week I was browsing through the old issues...
In my previous posts I wrote about a tournament that was played in a chateau, now it's time to tell about my experiences of playing chess in a slightly different environment. During my first weeks in France the places where I played chess the most...
Despite an unfortunate loss in Round 8, in the next round I was playing on the second table again. I was a part of a large group that was sharing 5th place and so I was paired with GM Gabriel Flom. It was my fourth game against a grandmaster in th...
At the end of Day 1 of the Chateau d'Asnieres rapid tournament I found myself at the top of the tournament table with 4/4. In the evening I learned that I am playing GM Etienne Bacrot in Round 5. I was really excited, as it was going to be my...
Seven weeks ago I have moved from Singapore to France to start in a new job. It has been quite a journey so far, especially since neither me, nor my wife spoke any French at the start and so navigating the daily life was not always easy. However...
When I was playing basketball in the high school, our coach always repeated the same mantra: "Defense wins games". None of us liked to hear it back then and even fewer of us could really put this phrase into practice, but of course the coach was r...
One of the most precious chess books in my collection is "20 games of the Twelfth USSR Championship" by Igor Bondarevsky. The cover of this pocket-size book looks like this: However, my copy of this book is more battered and bruised. The insc...
There is nothing more exciting - and at the same time nothing more scary - than to read the reviews of your own book. "The Life and Games of Vasily Smyslov: Volume I - The Early Years: 1921-1948" has been published a few months ago, and I am reall...
The Russian chess historian Sergey Voronkov has recently published a new book about Alexander Alekhine. The book is published in Russian language under the title "Russian Sphynx" and contains a wealth of material that either has not been publ...
A few weeks ago I signed up to play for my company team in the FIDE World Corporate Chess Championship, which took place this weekend. It turned out to be an intense competition, with many strong players and tons of exciting games played over...
Two weeks ago I did live commentary for Singapore Public Service Team Tournament and I decided to share my impressions of this interesting competition. This tournament is organized in Singapore annually since 1997, with the teams representing...
In the summer of 1935, Vasily Smyslov took part in his first chess tournament. Until that moment the future World champion played only at home, mostly against his father. Smyslov's main goal was to measure up against the ranked chess players ...
In February-March 1935 Moscow hosted the Second international chess tournament. Once again, the main stars of the tournament were the former World Champions, José Raúl Capablanca and Emanuel Lasker, and just like in 1925, neithe...
Vasily Vasilievich Smyslov learned chess in 1927, at the age of six and a half. His first teacher was his father, Vasily Osipovich Smyslov, and he was quite a strong player himself. After all, how many amateurs could claim victories over not just ...
When I started working on the book about the early years of Vasily Smyslov, I often asked myself - how did the world look like when he was born, almost a hundred years ago? How did it feel growing up in Moscow in the 1920s? Of course, I had some...
For the past few years I’ve been working on a book about the 7th world champion, Vasily Smyslov, and I am happy to announce that "The Life and Games of Vasily Smyslov. Volume I: The Early Years 1921-1948" has finally gone to print! If e...
"Why study classics?" is a question that I hear quite often these and one that was never seriously asked in my youth. 30 years ago studying classics was universally accepted as the best way to learn chess, together with analyzing one's own games. ...
Somewhat strangely, the chess life in Singapore has never been so active and buzzing with excitement as it is during the COVID-19 crisis. This resurgence is mostly thanks to #ChessAgainstCovid initiative, which I described in my previous post. At ...
About a month ago Singaporean GM Kevin Goh Wei Ming started a great charity initiative called Chess against COVID. The goal is to raise funds through chess for the families most affected by COVID-19 pandemic - those who have lost jobs, the el...
Last weekend I took part in Cairnhill Open, a local tournament here in Singapore. In fact, there were two separate tournaments, 9-round rapid and 11-round blitz, so I played more chess than I usually do in a normal month I did surprisin...
