There are two openings you must master if you want to be a World Champion: The Ruy Lopez and the Queen's Gambit. If you look at the great World Champions, all of them could play these openings extremly well from either side! In round 5 of the Ta...
Wijk Aan Zee is not just a tournament. It is a festival, a chess bonanza of sorts. Different categories, different strengths, make it the perfect way to start any year. It's long tradition saw it's names changing from Hoogovens to Corus to Tata St...
Hello everyone. I wrote once some tips to beat stronger opponents. In this post I bring a game where I faced a higher rated player, and things were good for me. I wrote some comments and tried to explain some lines. In some way I just got ...
Here are two fun games from the Australian Junior Chess Championships, where Harry the H-Pawn gets involved in some thematic London System attacks. Two rounds later... And you thought the London System was just a quiet way to ...
A cheery 'Good Morning' to those of you joining me for some more of the innumerable chess games that I have floating around my head. I have taken time off from annotating games for the second part of the Charousek article to add one of Morphy's ...
This was a game which I played in the year opening tourney in Budapest. My opponent was an old gentleman, an International Master Jevgenyij Boguszlavszkij. In our last game he palyed the Bogo-indian defense and safed the end...
Looking for inspiration, to see if I play in the Icelandic Chess Club Championship at the end of February, I find myself looking at Gufeld's games.... And then I found this jewel! I know, I know, beauty is a subjective thing....but when I went...
If you want to go straight to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1oVpCt_EcY&t=1s Win like Rashid Nezhmetdinov! An amazing player who never became GM. When I first saw this game, I thought wow I would love to find such a strong ...
Dag allemaal! Do I really need to write this blog? Do I? These are the things I'm wondering to myself right now, because I played and absolutely HORRIBLE game from the opening which I never deserved to draw. At one point in the game I was even&n...
This is the first in a new series I've been wanting to do for awhile where I will analyze interesting quick or blitz games played solely for the purpose of learning. In this 3/2 game on chess.com I play 1. e4 and face something interestin...
In round 4 of the 2019 Tata Steel tournament, Anish Giri scored another victory with the Black pieces, this time against Richard Rapport.
Predictions for @tatasteelchess based on "Bestuzhev index" (percentage of points in classical games against each other, as per chessgamescom data). @lachesisq is the only player to have classical games against all 13 opponents, and has best poin...
For many years now, a gentleman by the name of Josh Stewart has been running a chess group for children. Originally, I went with my oldest daughter, Ailene. (She is now 22.) Now I am going with my youngest daughter, Angel. (She is a Senior in High...
Greetings! Day 4 at TATA steel chess was a good one for me! I won my game, had dinner with legends and appeared on the official broadcast joining IM Lawrence Trent and IM Anna Rudolph! More on that later in this blog. Day one at TATA...
Paul Keres defeated more world champions (9!) than any other chess player. That list includes every world champion from Jose Capablanca through Bobby Fischer. Here is his very first recorded win against a future world champion, Vassily Smyslov. ...
With one loss in the books, we turned our attention to the second week's match against the Australia Kangaroos. They don't have the star power of Ding Liren or Caruana+So, but they definitely have two young stars worth keeping one's eyes on: Alexe...
Been reading through the old issues of 64 (many of them are available for free at the Russian Chess Federation website) and other Soviet chess publications recently. This gave me, among other things, two excellent pieces on women's chess...
This blog isn't exactly on chess... I've just started searching for chess paintings and images in the web. I've found many many great posts with beautiful collections, some thematic, some with reconstructive intentions of the displayed chess posit...
Hello everyone. As you already know, tactics is a very important aspect of the game if you want to raise your level. In this post, I’m going to explain 5 selected puzzles, where you have to win using Clearance Tactical Theme. We talk about...
Hello chess.com! Today was day three at TATA steel chess for us amateurs and the second day for the challengers and masters. I closed this day off with a draw, which put me on 2.5/3, clinching the group victory! Day one at TATA can be fou...
Today, in the 2nd round of Tata Steel, Giri, playing Black, scored an amazing victory against Kramnik!
Another article about women's chess, written two years after Alexandra Klimenko. Olga Morachevskaya (1906-1973) was a three-time Moscow champion and shared 2nd-3rd places at the 5th Soviet Women's Chess Championship in 1938. In 1945, she played a ...
This column from the Soviet magazine Shakhmatniy Listok looks quite modern, even though 90 years have passed since its publication. Not all woman players were satisfied with the work of chess authorities. The author rises a legitimate point e...
Hello chess lovers! As I addressed in my last post, I'm currently playing at the TATA steel chess tournament in WIjk aan Zee. I planned to blog daily about my performance, so far so good! Missed the first blog? Read it back here I've been pl...
Welcome! In this post, as you might have guessed from the title, I am going to be sharing with you some tactical moments that have arisen in some of my recent blitz games. I didn't have to look far for these, because naturally blitz games contai...