Please help IM Timothy Taylor if you can. This guy is a great author and a nice fellow. Thank you, You can get in touch with Tim through his chess.com account. Even 5$ helps. edit : I'm also happy to offer a free analyze or coaching sess...
Having recently read a funny thread where this topic cropped up, I was wondering how much encouragement one should expect from his chess coach ? We all love to be cheered and admired don’t we ? Also, doesn’t it feel good when a (much) stronger pl...
This is the follow-up to my previous blog article. If you haven't read it yet, I recommend you start there to know the full story.Here is the position that I offered as an exercise in the first article. I invited people to play the black side agai...
DISCLAIMER : this article is not a discussion about the relative chess powers of humans and engines. While listening to the very interesting show of GM Magesh last week, someone asked him why he wasn't using an engine to perform his analysis ? Wh...
As my chess coach says, one book on the table induces work, but 20 create confusion. In our times of ‘Too Much (chess) Information’ (Soltis), I thought it would be useful for people who can’t afford a coach, or want to supplement his teachings, t...
The question of whether you should spend time studying openings or not is the Nessie of chess improvement forums. Rather than take sides on this dangerous topic (I’m neither an integrist of the “thou shalt not study openings” dogma, nor an openin...
Where do you stand on the chess maturity ladder ? 1. Not putting pieces en prise 2. Setting up simple traps 3. Focusing to avoid simple traps ("what does he want to do ?") 4. Knowing your chosen openings basic i...
When I was younger, I took some correspondence chess classes where the author claimed that Russians used to practice calculation with positions that were just too hard to be fully calculated. The point wasn't to find the truth of the position, but...
Now for something completely different. Though I'm usually no big fan of chess variants and unorthodox problems, I can't resist sharing the very entertaining and puzzling problem a chess friend has shown us at the club today. Normal chess rules ...
GM Nigel Davies kindly invited me to write articles for his blog, the Chess Improver. My first post relates Mamedyarov's fantastic performance at the Istambul Olympiad and includes an annotated game where he shows the power of the passed pawn ! ...
This is from an OTB tournament game, where after ~5 hrs. of play I had to make some important decision after my opponent's move 45...Bxf3. I had enough time on my clock and energy left, and I decided quickly enough. What would you have played as ...
Patterns are extremely important in chess. Knowing them helps us generate candidate moves, dig deeper into the calculations of variations, and create beautiful combinations by literally speaking, combining various basic elements of our chess vocab...
There are at least 3 Knight forks hidden in this game. Can you find them ?
Before reading on, give yourself a few minutes to try and solve this problem : If you found it, congratulations ! I didn't. And I think this kind of position is extremely challenging, because ...
Difficult, but worth a try, if only to appreciate the beauty of the solution
Last week, I was browsing through some chess books in a famous Paris book store, looking for inspiration, when the shop owner offered his help. I politely declined, but when I looked up in his direction, I noticed an unusual position on the wall ...
John was a bit nervous today. For the very first time, he was going to play a game against his mentor, a long game, with clocks and all the regular stuff. Of course, it wasn’t his first competitive game : since he had decided to take advantage of ...
The first four articles of this series are available in the Learning with Fun group forum. A well-known chess recipe to fight against a gambit is to take the pawn on offer, and give it back sometimes later to complete development. The key idea he...
Well, you know, sometimes you look at a game with friends, and you stop in front of a move. It's surprising, it's original, but it can't work, can it ? So you try to refute it, but you don't manage to. This is just a great move, a classy move...Go...
One of the recreational past-times we enjoy at my club is to bring along interesting positions and games and analyze them together. It's always funny and instructive, because you can pit your ideas against those of your teammates, and you actually...
After a difficult tournament last summer, I tried my luck again in a 9-round FIDE tournament last week. I had diligently trained my tactics in the past three months and was determined to do my best. Well the results were above everything I could ...
You know what they say about Knights on the rim ? They're dim. If my English is correct, the word somewhat relates to the light. Well, I recently ran across a funny position. Could there possible be places for Knights where they just become so di...
Well, you can't always study chess, so there comes a time you have to make the big plunge. I decided to try and play the Najdorf in the 1st team match of my national league. the conditions were good, as our team was stronger and my opponent was 2...
As I mentioned in my first post, I think the Najdorf 6.Bc4 lines are very dangerous to face unprepared. Thus, it's a good idea to look what white is after in order to deal correctly with it OTB. I like to look first at the most direct attempts, ...
Hello, I've decided to include the Najdorf in my repertoire as Black, and to travel along this path with the chess.com community, hoping to get valuable insights from other members and at the same time improve my learning process by sharing my t...
