It's rare that the Soviets were out-prepared, but in a game preceding our featured game against Yasser Seirawan, Anatoly Karpov found his prepared piece sacrifice (likely prepared by Efim Geller) refuted over the chess board in fine fashion. You c...
Looking at some of the games of Simagin with the Black pieces in the book "Vladimir Simagin", by Aidan Woodger, I came across two games played in 1959 and 1960 against F. Olafsson and viktor Korchnoi, respectively. I am always intrigued at how g...
Welcome all! Yesterday saw the kick off for one of the strongest tournaments in the world - The Isle of Man International. 20 Super Grandmasters (2700+) are present, so winning this event will be some feat. From England, Michael Adams, David How...
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THINKING IN PHOTOGRAPHY AND CHESS FOLLOWS THE SAME LAW. Your thought process and its results in chess are closely related to visual-spatial intelligence. You use the visual problem-solving skills all the time. They help you do...
The World Championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana is less than three weeks away, so it is a great time for predictions and analysis. I believe that the outcome of this match will be mostly decided by psychological factors. ...
There are a lot of top players that promised a lot and were strong beyond imagination, yet never became World Champions. Their games left behind a lot to learn, yet they never made the finishing line, the line to glory. In this post I discuss wh...
It's been hectic, chaotic, exhausting yet curiously rewarding time since the Olympiad finished. In the few days between the Olympiad and the European Club Cup I thought I would rest, but life thought otherwise. So going to Porto Carras I was alr...
Honey I'm home!! After a period where posting stuff when it suited me was a problem, I am back posting. O.K. Whilst on holiday recently I took this book with me. Gyula Breyer. A name thrown about by the 'Raymond Keene - book in a...
Hi Chess Friends, I played a blitz game this evening, which followed a key strategic theme from a famous Capablanca game. Since I'm a chess mortal, and only had three minutes, my game was messier than Capa's masterpiece, but I still think it's f...
Hi, there! And again, I brought you a few games in the friendlist! We have already spoken about many exotic openings: like a Van Geet opening, Schilling-Kostic gambit and even a Mao Tse Tung Attack (My Good games #19).&nb...
Hey Folks! I'm back once again, and let's continue the series. As I stated in the last post, today we'll talk about openings. The opening is important - yes, it is very, very impor...
Hello my chess friends. As you already know, tactics is a fundamental aspect of the game if you want to raise your level. In this post, I’m going to try to help you to improve explaining these 5 puzzles, where you have to win, using Double T...
BRAND NEW Live Chess Playthrough Video Course by FM Dalton Perrine (Advanced) CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP NOW One of the goals of active chess players is to crack the 1800 rating barrier. This 3 hour and 21 minute video course features 1...
With the upcoming world chess championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana there is an increased interest in the two contenders. Alexander Kalinin recently published the book Fabiano Caruana – His Amazing Story and His ...
In a previous blog post we were looking at knight sacrifices on g7. The most famous of such sacrifices occurred in one of Mikhail Tal's games and there is a famous "hippo story" that is connected with it. The story is so famous that it...
This blog will include at least 2 games by Isaac Boleslavsky. I have been intrigued by him for a while now....I knew he was strong for he played a Final Candidates Match against Bronstein in 1950. I even posted a blog about him.... https://w...
Anatoly Karpov rarely entered full-on "Tal-mode," but in this magnificent attack against the German grandmaster, Robert Huebner, he does just that! An extremely speculative bishop sacrifice on g7 leads to extreme pressure, but accurate and creativ...
Hey Folks! Long, long time since I wrote, but I did learn something from the time since I stopped taking chess seriously and yes, it's changing my life. Yes, and it's changing my chess too. I used to search...
Some of his colleague GMs say Carlsen doesn’t play chess actually. They say he is not a real chess player. Few players still do play chess “in contrast to Carlsen, who prefers to wait for his opponent to make a mistake rather than tr...
Hi everyone. Probably, you have already heard about distant opposition in chess. But maybe you are not so clear about what it is, or what is it good for, or how to use it. In this post we are going to try to learn about it and answer those questio...
Navigating around Chess.com is obviously an essential part of the site; what good are a million new features if you can't navigate to them? To that end, we are releasing a brand new navigation slowly to a few members (roughly 1 percent) at a tim...
Earlier today, I learned that Javokhir Sindarov, the promising 12-year old junior from Uzbekistan, achieved his final GM Norm at the October 2018 First Saturday GM Tournament, at the age of 12 years and 10 months. Like most young players...
In my first post as a Top Blogger (@SamCopeland, thanks for the honor!), I'd like to try my hand at an exercise that one of my many favorite bloggers, FM Michel Coto (@Michel2426), recommends. If you're not already reading Michel's posts and ...
I recently wrote two long posts comparing the D-Pawn Systems: Part 1: (Lame Torre, Levitsky, Stonewall Attack, Richter-Veresov, Jobava Attack) Part 2: (Colle, Rubinstein Attack, London) In case you missed them, do check these out. ...
Chess World Championship Data The FIDE World Chess Championship is just under a month away! In anticipation of the event I wanted to take a closer look at the data from the games of World Champion Magnus Carlsen. In particular the games fro...