The November recap was written by @dpnorman. Untitled Tuesday: November 2019 The November edition of Untitled Tuesday featured 27 players and a rating range from the 2300s to the 1100s. The field included nine players finishing over 2000 and o...
I like to think about chess. All aspects of it, whether they are psychology, plans in a certain type of position, openings, endgames, ways to study. I have written before about certain puzzling moments from chess history that I will proba...
“In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame.” - Jose R...
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...
Dear Chess Friends! This is the recording from the webinar that I conducted this Sunday (8th December). On the webinar I tried to explain how to lock enemy pieces out and what to apply to exploit this advantage! We analyzed 3 game fragments wh...
Hello Caissa’s friends. In this post I bring some puzzles I got from my training sessions. These are the 5 most impressive and instructive ones I have seen in last days. I suggest you to work with the video; it is recorded in a way that you ...
I've made blog postings about different aspects of music that had caught my eye— mostly with folk music and usually quite convoluted. These include: Wasn't That a TimeTwo by TwoWild Old FamilyThe First Time ...
I've always enjoyed studying the 4.Bg5 Grunfeld for the wealth of creative ideas that are possible for black. It's one of those lines that for some reason keeps on giving. For instance, here are just a few exotic tries I've toyed around with in th...
In my previous two visits to Reno I'd been within striking distance of the hefty Class A prize both times. This time, though, I couldn't shake the memory of multiple bad tournaments in a row, and I wasn't optimistic. I might have chick...
Some chess moves have a striking impression on our psyche; they leave a mark! When you look at game collections, you find that a Master can give you inspiration in different ways; maybe a new opening line, or how he builds an attack, or defends a ...
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...
In chess, the sporting element is supreme right now. The artistic side of the game has been pushed aside by a more "mathematical", computerized approach to the game. I remember Anand getting in trouble in a game because he "forgot the move order...
The Learner Series will highlight players that have made significant rating progress over the past few years. The second guest in the series, Paul, is a one of my good friends and a chess student. He has gone from 1200-1750 chess.com blitz over a ...
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...
Dear Chess Friends! Our last webinar was devoted to Semi-Slav Defense sidelines. And, of course, openings are important and sometimes home preparation plays the most significant role in the game. But your ability to think and play strategically ...
The buttons in bughouse allow players to make requests without typing. There are buttons such as "trades are good", "trades are bad", "sit", "go" and requests for each of the pieces. FICS has some good buttons, and some questionable ones, includin...
The biennial SEA Games- sort of like an Olympic Games among the 11 South East Asian countries, is considered the 3rd most prestigious multi-sport event for Singaporeans, after the Olympics and the Asian Games. The gold medal winner of the event is...
Our BOOK OF THE WEEK is FIDE's Book of the Year: Together with the Candidates. Also known as the Averbakh/Boleslavsky Award in respect of these two giants of chess literature, GM Artur Jussupow presided over the three-man indep...
Hey there, Stacia here and I'm at it again with a two for one sale in honor of Cyber Monday! I'm on a quest to get to 1700 before the end of the year and I better hurry so here I present to you not one training game, but two with the same theme....
Hey people from the 64 squares kingdom. As I told you in my last post, there is a Puzzle Battle World Championship. I’d really like to qualify, but honestly, one week ago I didn’t think I could, I will let you know why below. In this p...
We're half-way through my series on moments in the history of computer chess! So far, we've chartered the course of computers and chess from the automata of the 18th century to the early computing developments by chess-fan teams at IBM and Los ...
The ChessGoals.com Learner Series will highlight players that have made significant rating progress over the past few years. The first guest in the series, Jesse, is a good friend of mine and definitely a student of the game. He has gained over 25...
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...
My Dear Chess Friends! In this post I want to share with you where to play for IM or GM norm and how to get these norms. Everything is based on my own experience. Looking ahead I can say that I didn't get a norm, but could do it. However, I incr...
Recently Knuppelberry published a forum post on the possible virtues of the Hungarian Defense. https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-openings/thoughts-on-the-hungarian-defense and this stirred some memories. I remember liking this defens...