IM Jeremy Silman Joins Chess.com Columnists

Chess.com is sorry to see IM Andrew Martin move on. His "Your Questions Answered" columns have been extremely good and well-appreciated here. We wish him all the best in his future endeavors. We are lucky to welcome another excellent columnist to take his place.

International Master Jeremy Silman is a chess professional who has won the American Open, the National Open, and the U.S. Open; only a few other players have ever won all three of these prestigious events. Though highly respected as a player, Mr. Silman is better known as a world-class lecturer, teacher, and writer. The author of over thirty-seven chess books and one book on the psychology of gambling (ZEN AND THE ART OF CASINO GAMING), his work has been published by such houses as Maxwell/Macmillan, Cadogan, and Microsoft Press, with several books having been translated into German, Italian and French. His chess articles, over a hundred, have appeared in English, Dutch, German, and American magazines.

Jeremy began to write fiction in 1994. His first screenplay, THE CHESS PLAYERS, was optioned by LMK Productions, Inc. at the end of that year.

In 2001, Mr. Silman was hired as the chess consultant for the motion picture, HARRY POTTER and the SORCERER’S STONE. In 2002, he became the chess consultant for the HBO series, ARLISS. In 2003, Jeremy was called in to design multiple chess scenes for an episode of MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE, and more recently he designed several chess scenes for an episode of MONK.

Jeremy has already contributed to chess.com some really great chess mentor courses (more than a dozen!), which I personally have been studying and enjoying. For example, check out:

http://www.chess.com/chessmentor/view_course.html?id=302

and http://www.chess.com/chessmentor/view_course.html?id=22

According to my recollections, during my first couple years of tournament chess, Jeremy was maintaining a really great column in Chess Life called "The Amateur's Mind." I think that the title itself highlights one of Jeremy's great strengths as a teacher: really thinking about what class players' thought processes are like. Hopefully, chess.com members can now benefit from this through his column. Send your questions for Jeremy to AskJeremy@chess.com .

As I like to do in these introductions, here is a selection of some of his great games. I have picked a few games, which show off the logical, deep positional understanding, which I think is fundamental to his play:

Jeremy is kind enough to provide us notes to this first game, a very thorough positional demonstration:

The following game starts off with strategical outplaying, but also includes an instructive and delicate rook endgame: