The annual Melody Amber tournament is understandably very popular with the players and chess fans alike. The competitors get to play for the considerable prize fund of €216,000 in the beautiful location of Nice, France and because the games are e...
The US SuperNationals will take place in Nashville, Tennesse, from 3-5 April. The SuperNationals are a joint scholastic chess event for three categories - elementary, junior high, and high school - held together every 4 years as one big event. T...
This year's Linares tournament has been blessed with some very impressive and hard fought chess games, but with the players so evenly matched, the percentage of draws is stubbornly high. Only one of the four clashes in round 8 ended with a decisi...
It is a great pleasure to welcome Grandmaster Gregory Serper as chess.com's Sunday columnist.Gregory is a strong Grandmaster, and the most experienced among our current staff of columnists. His experience extends not only to tournament play, but a...
In the first round of the second half in Linares, Levon Aronian recovered from two losses in a row with an excellent win over Magnus Carlsen, who missed a chance to reach a theoretically drawn f+ h rook ending. All other games were drawn and so Gr...
Every chess player grows up learning combinations that work. As a kid, you learn to 'spot the combo' quickly and you're told that you will profit from this knowledge ever after. There's hundreds of books that are written according to this method. ...
Possible films about Bobby Fischer's life have been mooted for a long time, but following his death just over a year ago, the time is now ripe for it to happen at last. Producer Damian Chapa is due to start filming an Amadeus Pictures biopic of B...
At the halfway point in Linares, Alexander Grischuk leads on 5/7, a point clear of Magnus Carlsen and Vassily Ivanchuk, who are tied in second place on 4/7. Ivanchuk was the only winner in round 7, finally managing to convert a promising position...
French GM Etienne Bacrot has won the 2009 Aeroflot Open in Moscow. He finished on on 6.5/9 alongside Alexander Moiseenko but the Frenchman took first place because he played more games with the black pieces than Moiseenko. Corus winner Sergey Karj...
Yearbook 90 has just arrived!In this issue of The Chess Player's Guide to Opening News you will find answers to urgent quenstions like:-- what was the most original gambit of the year 2008? -- will KingLoek finally admit defeat in the Botvinnik Sl...
The 12th and 13th round of the Schachbundesliga take place the upcoming weekend and the top teams of Baden-Baden, Eppingen and Bremen will meet in Eppingen with very strong line-ups for some top-class matches. For the first time in its history, th...
Frenchman Etienne Bacrot (pictured) won the Aeroflot Open in Moscow and so earned €70,000 and an invite to the Dortmund super-GM tournament in July this year. He did it the hard way, beating Armenian GM Arman Pashikian who was the leader going in...
The first half of Linares is over and it's Grischuk who leads the field at 5/7, a point clear of Ivanchuk and Carlsen. In round 7, the Russian grandmaster drew Anand with Black while Ivanchuk inflicted a loss on Aronian - the second in a row for t...
I am very pleased to introduce chess.com's new columnist for Fridays, WIM Iryna Zenyuk! Iryna moved from the Ukraine to the USA in 2001. She was soon strong enough to be competing in the U.S. Women's Championship. For some time, although she was ...
Veselin Topalov defeated Gata Kamsky today to score a 4.5-2.5 win in the Challenger's Match in Sofia. In doing so, the Bulgarian qualified for a World Championship Match against Viswanathan Anand.From February 16th to 28th the match between Kamsky...
Cheer Up Topa, You Won! So in the end it was asking too much of Kamsky to beat the world's top rated player, especially on his home patch in Bulgaria. Kamsky tried the French defence again in Game 7, but fared no better than his previous loss i...
In retrospect the 6th round of Linares 2009 might become a historical day: 18-year-old Magnus Carlsen beat World Champion Anand for the first time in his life. Grischuk, who entered the tournament after Topalov had to cancel, defeated Aronian and ...
ChessVibes Openings #8 is out! Our latest issue of ChessVibes Openings brings you the most important opening developments from last week, covering the Topalov-Kamsky match, Linares and Aeroflot. In Moscow, Russian GM Vitiugov cleary missed our rec...
It's unusual for Linares to be overshadowed by another event, but the Kamsky-Topalov match has understandably been distracting attention from this extremely strong and prestigious annual tournament. In Round 5 all games were drawn, but most clash...
Levon Aronian and Alexander Grischuk are still sharing the lead in Linares after all round 5 games ended in a draw. Aronian accepted a quick peace offer by Wang Yue while Grischuk's White repertoire had no answer to Carlsen's Sveshnikov. Anand mir...
Using the Caro-Kann, Veselin Topalov drew Gata Kamsky today in the Challenger's Match to retain his one-point lead: 3¬?-2¬?. The Bulgarian is one win away from his second world championship match. The Kamsky-Topalov World Championship Semi-Final M...
Gata Kamsky failed to make a dent against Topalov's choice of the Caro-Kann defence in game 6 of their 8-game match for the right to challenge world champion Vishy Anand. Kamsky tried the advance variation with 4. Nf3 but after Topalov played the...
Adriaan de Groot (1914-2006) was a strong chess player who represented Holland at three Olympiads.But his real claim to fame is his groundbreaking book Thought and Choice in Chess, his thesis of 1948 which inspired a breakthrough in empirical cogn...
In what was a small, friendly and cosy "cafe tournament", the young Dutch talent Robin van Kampen scored his first IM norm. He finished on 6/9 together with the only grandmaster in the field, Ilan Manor from Israel. Amsterdam has got itself a bran...
