In a recent daily game my Four Knights repertoire was tested to breaking point, following a theoretically-critical game all the way to move 27 before an unfortunate and embarrassing double-blunder meant that the game lost theoretical significance....
It is 11:00 at night. Armed with an article from New In Chess Yearbook 127, I am attempting to look at some main line Dragon theory. A sideline on move 17 catches my attention: Beautiful stuff, yes. But a crisis begins to form in my puny bra...
Introduction Yesterday I identified weaknesses in my White repertoire and tried to fix my most major issue - 2...d6 Sicilians. Today I shall be looking at the sidelines which have caused problems. 2. Pirc / Modern Problem I'm currently pl...
Introduction These are the lines as White in which I feel most uncomfortable at the moment: 2...d6 Sicilians (Najdorf, Dragon, Classical) Pirc / Modern Rubinstein French Accelerated Dragon Sveshnikov Scandinavian Alekhine with 2...d5 Nimzowitsc...
Introduction One of my main chess goals at the start of the summer was to have a good opening repertoire by the time I go back to university in October. Too often in the early middlegame I seem to find myself in positions which I don't understand...
Came across this position in Opening Explorer during analysis of a rapid game I played recently. White to play and secure a nice advantage:
In the style of Christopher Lutz's excellent Endgame Secrets (Batsford, 1999), I invite you to analyse the following moves. More specifically: i) Come up with a good plan of defence in the initial position for Black. ii) Can Black save the game ...
To be fair, my opponent did stumble into one of the lines I know very well thanks to doing a lot of prep on it for the British Championships in July. Still, a fun game, and possibly theoretically important. Unfortunately Cambridge lost to Oxford...
An interesting Rapidplay (25 mins) game from last night. Themes: Complex early middlegame; zwischenzug; Rook play.
A good recent tournament for me - I finished with a TPR of 2388 and had many interesting and enjoyable games. The tournament was well-managed, with an excellent playing area and free water available. Both this and the previous congress I attended ...
Today I participated in the 2nd Muswell Hill Weekday Rapidplay Tournament. While seeming from its name to be a small, friendly, local tournament it is actually quite strong (this month it included a GM, an IM, two FMs and two CMs) and is thus a gr...
I had a rather strange game in a county match yesterday: At first, the game does not seem that odd. The opening trap is very famous, and after that it is a relatively simple conversion into a win. What is strange, however, is how a fairly strong...
Last week, I played in the 6th Gibraltar Junior Chess Festival at the Caleta Hotel as part of the England Junior Squad. The junior tournament is very much similar in organisation to the main event, the Tradewise Gibraltar Masters, run in January/F...
Here is how to deal with some annoying openings after 1.e4 for both sides. Starting with the least sound: 1. Matinovsky Gambit 2. Elephant Gambit 3. Latvian Gambit None of the following attempt to refute the annoying opening,...
I have played in a tournament and two matches over the last month. Here are the games from them: South of England U16 Closed Result: 4/5, 1st. Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Round 4 Round 5 The other players 3/4 apart from m...
The British Chess Championships 2015 is being held at Warwick University in Coventry. My father and I travelled there for a week to play in the U180 graded section, which, strangely, used ECF grade boundaries but FIDE ratings for seeding. This mea...
The Gigafinal U13 Boys this year was hotly contested with a 180 and lots of 140 graded players. It was an interesting tournament for me with 5 good games out of 6. Round 1 I was 5th seed with a grade of 143 playing an unrated player as Black who...
