I've been reading chess blogs for years. Chess.com, Lichess forums, personal sites. Places where people shared opening ideas they'd been tinkering with, annotated their tournament games with honest assessments of their blunders, wrote about the ps...
Go to Washington Square Park. Or Dupont Circle. Or any city park where chess hustlers set up their boards. Watch for ten minutes. You'll see more life than in a year of super-tournaments. THE HUSTLERS KNOW SOMETHING The hustler takes your ...
I own maybe thirty chess books. I've read perhaps five of them cover to cover. I've improved from exactly zero of them. This is not a confession of laziness. This is a report from the field. THE SHELF Walk into any serious chess player's hom...
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in a six-game match. Newsweek's cover declared it "The Brain's Last Stand." Commentators announced the death of chess. Why would anyone play a game that machines had solve...
You've learned the rules. You've played some games. The Queen's leap no longer surprises you. You've watched for concourse formations, protected your throne, maybe seized an ally's. Now you want to know what's underneath. You don't have to loo...
All right. You've read four posts about Victorian occultists, angelic communications, concourse captures, and throne-seizure mechanics. You're either intrigued, confused, or both. Now you want to actually do something. Here's how. OPTION 1: Th...
Here's something that might surprise you: people are still talking about Enochian Chess. A Chess.com forum thread from 2012 (still occasionally revived) contains this observation: "Enochian Chess is the Occultist's Chess. It can be used both for...
Here's a question that has bothered philosophers since Plato: What is a game for? The standard answer (entertainment, passing time, competition) explains chess clubs but not Enochian Chess. Nobody constructs a variant with Egyptian god-forms, th...
The magical practices of the Golden Dawn are of no concern to the chess variant community. So says the Chess Variants website, and they're not wrong. You can play Enochian Chess purely as a game, ignoring every mystical attribution, and still find...
Chess variants are sometimes created and played in particular subcultures outside the chess community itself. Star Trek gave us Tridimensional Chess. Gary Gygax and the Dungeons & Dragons phenomenon spawned Dragonchess. And the world of Victor...
Chess.com gives out this curious little thing called the TV Junkie award, for watching ChessTV twenty-four hours. At first glance, it sounds heroic. Watching TV, after all, is a perfectly legitimate activity. Nothing shameful there. But the moment...
Becoming a Grandmaster begins with the dangerous act of believing yourself, which is rarely mentioned in the official checklists because it cannot be measured, ranked, or certified. There are tactics, openings, endgames, studies, guides, systems, ...
