It's been a while since I wrote a blog here. Today, I want to write about two games of mine that I will fondly remember. In both games, the loser had a crushing positions, a forced mate in fact. But a sudden unexpected "threat" against him ...
This is going to be a quick blog. I have played chess on this website since October of 2013. As of right now, I have played over 11,000 blitz games and over 1,400 rapid games here. Needless to say, I have scored quite a few memorable wins duri...
I've been wanting to write a blog about this game for quite some time now (several years). After years of procrastinating for no good reason, I am finally writing it. I started out chess as a very materialistic and positional player. I didn't g...
Just now, the most wildest thing has happened to me in my chess career so far: I played a GM on chess.com... and won. Everything about this is just surreal. I actually haven't been playing rapid in over a month, and instead, I've been playing 3...
It must have been around the 1st week of January in 2014 when I said to myself "You know what? I'm going to increase my rating to 2000 at this site." And believe it or not, I was naive enough to think that this will happen in few months, if not fe...
Endgame is a deceptive phase of the game. With so many pieces traded off the board, it's very easy to assume that the position is simple, and that there are no hidden surprises waiting around the corner. It is very easy to believe that just playin...
18 games of 15/10 time control. 11 win, 6 loss, 1 draw. How I win: win 1 (51 move). Queening a pawn in Q vs R+B endgame win 2 (73 move). Queening a pawn in K+P endgame win 3 (58 move). Queening a pawn in R vs N endgame win 4 (57 move). Quee...
Who I am naturally: although I don't want to admit it, probably a positional player who prefers quiet and risk-free positions. Who I want to be: tactical calculating machine and combinational genius. Can someone possibly be dissatisfied w...
Well, Summer is here. Summer vacation has started, and hopefully that means I will have a lot more time to study and improve my chess. During school year, I had neither the time, nor the self-discipline (mostly self-discipline) to have a strict ...
You know, I've played many online games in my life, most notable Starcraft and DotA. In those games, trash talking during the game was quite common. However, in Chess, I have noticed that trash talking is very rare. I have been playing on Ches...
Delivering a checkmate in a tense middlegame is one of the greatest joy one can experience in Chess. There are many patterns of checkmate, but this is one of the rarer one for me to do it in a real game. I like how his King's ...
I have seldom played a game that gave me so many things to think about. keep playing when losing even in seemingly losing positions, there can always be defensive resources. sometimes, it's good to present your opponent with many choices, rat...
One of the most satisfying thing in chess is sacrificing a lot of your pieces to force checkmate. However, equally satisfying is when you give checkmate with almost all the pieces still on the board. I remember reading in the introduction of som...
Well, I did not expect to write two chess blogs in 1 day, but after playing so much chess, (when I really should be studying ), there were many events that I wanted to write it down. So... at long last, I finally cracked 1800 rating on Blitz. ...
One of the nice things about moving up in ratings is that you get to play against stronger oppositions. After all, iron sharpens iron, and in order to improve, you constantly have to play against people who are better than those who you have previ...
So, I've been pretty lazy with updating my blogs. With school starting on August, I have been relatively busy with school work, and could not play that much Chess unfortunately. With limited time, I have to admit I have committed the sin of ...
Well, July seems to be a plateau month for me. I entered this month as 1750, and I leave as 1748. So not a lot of improvement, if any. One of the biggest reason for my drop in playing strength is simply playing too fast. Whether I'm just on tilt ...
When I first learned and started playing Chess, I had a concept called the one pawn advantage. It simply meant that I will win pawn (somehow) and proceed to mass liquidate the board and let that 1 pawn win me the game. Don't look for mates, don't ...
It's not everyday we apply something we learned to win a game. Things like opening theory, endgame theory, middlegame concepts... we don't always get to use them in a game since they need to appear on the board first before we can use them. ...
Well...June was relatively brutal month for me...chess-wise. At the end of May, I was on a pretty big momentum, coming off of a longest unbeaten streak of my life (16 games), and gaining well over 100 rating points on blitz, inching closer to the ...
One of the downside of a blitz game is that you cannot possibly hope to play the strongest moves every turn. There just isn't enough time for it. If it's a decent move, let alone a pretty good move, you better play it or you're going to burn unnec...
Tunnel vision is a relatively common occurance at amateur level. But sometimes, both players can be so tunnel visioned to a same thing that they both miss what they normally wouldn't. I just played a game where I won pretty handedly in 16 moves.....
I decided to keep a blog about memorable miniatures each month. So whenever I'm on a terrible losing streak or feeling down for some reason, I can look back at these games and hopefully lighten up the mood. I used the following criterias for c...
It had to come to an end sooner or later. From May 22nd to May 27th, I had my life's longest unbeaten streak on internet chess. I went 16 games straight without losing, compiling a 14 win, 2 draw record in the process. From this streak, my rating...
