Here’s how to get better: Do what you love. Doesn’t matter whether it’s chess, guitar, skiing, birdwatching, gardening, metalcraft, or anything else at all. When your heart is in it, talent follows. And for chess, the list from which to choose i...
There are too many moves in chess. Not merely too many moves for the best human players to consider, or even too many moves for the most powerful supercomputer to evaluate, but too many moves to even contemplate. The number of ways to arrange th...
The easy part of chess is math – simple math: more is better. When your pieces threaten more squares they become better. In general, when you move a piece so that it attacks twice as many squares as it did before, it becomes twice as good. Maneuv...
1989. I was 30 years old. Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison in Cañon City, home to Supermax, where notorious bad guys like the Unabomber, El Chapo, and the Bottom Marathon Bomber are kept. But Territorial was...
All your great moves won’t matter if you can’t close the deal. No matter how far ahead you are on board, if you can’t deliver checkmate, you don’t get the full point. Settling for a stalemate in a won position should never happen! It should sting ...
Bring a bigger army. That’s how to win. More forces equals more power – nothing fancy about that. Which is why it puzzles me when beginners choose to galavant with a single knight or a wayward queen in the opening. One foolhardy spy can’t properly...
Get ahead and stay ahead. For over a decade I ran the chess club at Colorado Springs Charter Academy, a K-8 charter school school I helped found back in 2004. My primary motivation in building the school was to create a better education for my ...
Before you can consistently win at chess you have to first appreciate how to lose at chess. Losing is more important. More than anything losing teaches resiliency. No other lessons could matter if, after a few losses, you gave up on the game. Ev...
