GM Ivan Sokolov, a former top-15 player in the world with a peak rating of 2706, is also one of the top chess coaches in the world. His individual students have included GMs Alireza Firouzja, Parham Maghsoodloo, and Jorden van Foreest, and he also...
Playing against children in open chess tournaments has become a very common experience in modern chess. One of the beautiful things about chess is that age, race, and gender hardly matter at the board. Even a 10-year-old can compete against experi...
Quantity has a quality all its own —Thomas A. Callaghan Jr In 2019, GM Hikaru Nakamura was over the hill. He was 32 years old and had gradually dropped nearly 70 points from his rating peak four years earlier, falling from number two...
The passing of legendary GM Jan Timman is a great loss for the chess world. Not only was he an elite player, often called "The Best of the West," but he was also a truly unique personality. When I saw his photos in chess magazines in the 1980s, ...
A long time ago, I watched a comedian who offered simple solutions to everyday problems. They went something like this: Want to impress a girl on a first date? Use a fake French accent—romance guaranteed. Got a bad haircut? Put on sungl...
They say that chess is the game of kings, an honorable pastime for people who want to lose themselves in thought. Bullet chess, however, played at a pace of one minute per side for the whole game, is anything but honorable. Bullet isn't a game of ...
I have a student who used to complain a lot about his opponents not resigning when they were down significant material. "When are you going to resign?", he would type in the chat whenever his opponent would lose a piece but kept playing. One day...
Imagine yourself in a situation: ahead of you is a chess game that you must win at all costs. Failure is not an option. This could be the last step toward a FIDE title you've been chasing your entire life, the final push to finally break the 2000 ...
"Cramped positions carry within them the germ of defeat." – Siegbert Tarrasch This spring, two of the strongest chess engines in the world, Stockfish and Torch, played a match featuring some bizarre starting positions. We asked the Chess.c...
Becoming a stronger player is about finding ways to turn knowledge into skill. - GM Tiger Hillarp Persson in Tiger's Chaos Theory. When you're new to chess, improvement is relatively easy. Most of us lose our first few games, and then start...
“There is no concrete preparation, the way it is in normal chess when you can memorize 20 moves and it's hard to even get a game—in this format, you always get a game!" - Magnus Carlsen, February 9, 2024. Have you tried F...
In normal chess, White has a small advantage in the opening at the start of every game. Because White can move first, engines like Stockfish give White an edge of about 0.25, an advantage, but well within the drawing margin. However, in Freestyle ...
Once upon a time, before Stockfish and glowing evaluation bars, analyzing your games meant something entirely different. You'd grab a notebook, sit with a friend or coach, replay the moves from memory, and try to answer questions like: "Where did ...
What's in a name? Have you seen this famous clip of GM Hikaru Nakamura calculating a deep combination in seconds with his famous "check, check, check...." How can Hikaru calculate that quickly? He's amazing, but it helped that he knew the s...
As we start our journey in the magical world called chess, one of the very first things we learn is the ultimate importance of time. "Each move should have a purpose," "Don't waste time," and "Develop your pieces as quickly as possible." These and...
Since the Speed Chess Championship (SCC) debuted in 2016, it's been completely dominated by two players. GM Magnus Carlsen won the first two editions in 2016 and 2017. After that, GM Hikaru Nakamura won five years in a row before Carlsen took back...
What separates a chess beginner from an experienced player? It's not just the brilliant moves that the star players find, it's also the bad moves that beginners play, which veteran players instinctively know to avoid. Here are five trades that ama...
Back in 1996, GM Garry Kasparov won 4-2 in a match versus the Deep Blue supercomputer. It turned out to be the last convincing human victory over an artificial chess player. The very next year, Deep Blue took revenge 3.5-2.5, and pretty soon match...
Losing is no fun! Unfortunately, all chess players end up in lost positions sometimes. The best ones know how to escape as often as possible and steal draws and wins from busted positions. Here are the techniques you need to know to be a chess Hou...
One of my first chess books was Richard Reti's Chess Textbook. The title of the book was a bit misleading, since the book was absolutely useless for total beginners. I assume that it was implied that any Soviet schoolboy knew the rules of chess as...
Eighty-five years ago GM Mikhail Botvinnik won the premier tournament of the year, the Soviet Chess Championship, with a very impressive score 12.5/17 (+8−0=9). Later, in his book about the tournament, Botvinnik shared his methods of chess p...
Every chess player dreams about scoring a huge upset. Maybe you want to beat your dad or grandmother at chess for the first time. Perhaps you’re trying to get your first win against a player rated over 1000, or even 2000. Although it’s...
Any experienced tournament player knows that playing for a win with the black pieces can be quite challenging, especially against a well-prepared opponent. Indeed, in most openings, White gets some initiative right from the start of the game due t...
Some chess games played by legendary players featured such impressive new concepts that they instantly became iconic. As time passed, these concepts turned into chess axioms. According to Wikipedia, "In classic philosophy, an axiom is a statement ...
I have no doubt that you've heard the saying, "Chess is 90% tactics" many times. It is so overused that it is impossible to trace who said it first. While in general I agree with this statement, I would still slightly modify it. So, channeling my ...
