At a news conference today, Chess.com admitted that its fair-play technology failed to protect users from identity theft on March 31. “The investigation is still ongoing, but one of the major symptoms was excessive screen lag in Blitz,&rdquo...
Hi friends! This Olympic-edition of my blog is dedicated to short-track speed skaters. I couldn’t help but think of them as we consider our topic—winning unopposed. They train hard for four years, race in a crowd, and whoever has the b...
Hi friends! We've all heard the old advice: chess improvement usually follows when we work through tactical puzzles. Today, we will take another approach to expanding our board vision through an understudied chess concept: the quiet move. ...
Hi friends! There’s nothing quite as embarrassing as not being in on the joke. Everyone’s laughing, and you’re not even sure what was so funny. Know the feeling? Maybe they are just laughing at you and that you lack their secret ...
Hi friends! Do you know that sinking feeling when a game is slipping through your fingers? It hits me in the pit in my stomach, and my inner critic starts shouting mid-game, "This is terrible! I can't believe you let that happen!” Waves of f...
Hi friends! Two young students, who can barely reach the middle of the table, are playing their own game. Pieces are landing with a thud, thud, thud. So I ask my question to break their momentum: "Why does White have two bishops on the same color?...
Hi friends! It may have already happened to you today. You're reviewing a game and see an incredible, back-breaking, brilliant move. Staring at your screen you wonder, “That's cool. How did I not see that?” The answer is that hig...
“Move it in an L-shape, two up and one over. Good. That’s it. Keep going.” I’ve always enjoyed watching elementary-age kids master knight moves. But there’s so much more to moving knights than counting squares. In t...
Friends, I'm an adult improver. Don't get discouraged. Challenge yourself. This is the third post in a series on my journey with chess. I've written about chess in my growing-up years (post #1) and chess with kids and beyond (post #2). Thi...
The fair-looking, foolhardy Jerome Gambit has seduced many an amateur chess player, offering two stunning sacrifices in the opening in search of a thrilling scalp. With any common sense, this ridiculous opening can be dispatched. But in Blitz or e...
In the early 2000s, I became the father of two girls. As they grew older, I started introducing the game to them. That meant I zeroed in on the market and to my delight, I found Fritz and Chester. My kids loved F&C more than actual chess bec...
I play college students, so you must be ready for the weird. This post will examine the most efficient way to coordinate an attack against the unsound Fried Fox, among the strangest of all openings. It was recently played on Title Tuesday (3/5) ...
For improvers like me, it's remarkable how one pawn move can springboard a short-term plan. In my previous post on the middlegame, I showed how I improved a doubled pawn and solved potential problems. This line in the Open Spanish inspired that pa...
The first time I saw this opening on the board, it drove me crazy. If your opponent plays it well, they can hold you at bay, but most people don't play this opening like this because they've been swimming in theory. They are trying to win by dra...
Here's a position from a recent game. Black to move and make progress. I decided on pushing the pawn to c5. My goal was to open c6 for my Knight with a further hope to relocate the Knight to d5. I was hoping for a Knight trade to fix my pawn ...
When I was eight or nine, my mom and dad showed me the game. It became a hyper-fixation. I saved money and bought books (classics, it turns out by Fred Reinfeld and Walter Korn), all written in classical notation with few diagrams. Then, they pu...
