If the title of this article made you think that it is another showcase of GM Mikhail Tal's magic, you would be wrong. Today, we are going to talk about a brilliant player from the past who is partially forgotten or at least not as well known as o...
Have you ever played against a grandmaster in a chess game? How long did you survive? If you lasted more than than 12 moves, then you did better than former world champion GM Anatoly Karpov in his roughest game, against GM Larry Christiansen. See ...
Recently I was explaining a concept of a chess X-ray to one of my students. I don't need to do it too often since surprisingly, most chess players, even quite inexperienced ones, know about it. So, I described chess X-rays as a situation where a...
The news of the Argentinian prodigy Faustino Oro becoming the youngest IM ever at the tender age of 10 made headlines worldwide. Faustino plays an attractive, aggressive kind of chess, and those of you who want to get better can learn a lot from h...
We've all been there. You are happily solving some puzzles on Chess.com, feeling good, rattling off forced checkmates and snappy tactics, and then %*&$—you get that dreaded, red "X." What?! How could your solution not be right?! That was...
When I was just starting in chess, our chess club's team went to participate in one of the national competitions. Here I need to mention that unlike the U.S. Nationals, open to anyone who knows how to move pieces, the Soviet Nationals were highly ...
Every chess player wants to play a brilliant move. But how do you know if a move is brilliant, and how can you find it in your own games? This article will tell you exactly what Game Review looks for in determining brilliant moves and offers some ...
There are three things you can watch forever: fire burning, water falling, and movies with Sir Anthony Hopkins. The psychological thriller "Fracture" was a big blockbuster in 2007. A very smart screenplay coupled with brilliant performances by Ant...
Many people who just started playing chess ask what games they should study in order to improve their skills. It is tempting to study games played by the highest-rated player in history, GM Magnus Carlsen, but this can be really counterproductive,...
When I was 11, my home city hosted the First League of the Soviet Championship. For chess players who weren't alive at that time, it is absolutely impossible to understand the importance of such an event for local players. These days you can wat...
In his book Positional Decision Making in Chess, GM Boris Gelfand describes how excited he got as a boy when his father brought home a new chess book, a collection of the games of Akiba Rubinstein. He read the book cover-to-cover and immediately s...
There are many ways to work on your chess improvement. You can study opening variations or typical endgames, solve tactical puzzles, and learn chess strategy. Also, it is extremely useful to analyze the games of the greatest chess players as well ...
Plot twists are popular in Hollywood because people really love them. After his breakthrough mega-hit The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan decided that every single movie he produces should have one at the end. As a result, while watching his movie...
Checkmate is the essence of chess. It ends the game, providing a satisfying closure to a long struggle. Checkmates can also be incredibly beautiful. By definition, checkmate involves coordination and teamwork between your pieces. No single piece...
A pin is probably the most common chess pattern. It is difficult for me to imagine any master game where there would be no pins in the actual game or in the variations that could've happened during the game. Also, it is probably one of the easiest...
Today we are going to discuss a common tactical idea that usually starts an immediate attack against your opponent's castled king. Here are the elements of this pattern: Your opponent castles to make their king safe They play h7-h6 (or h2-h3 ...
There is a very interesting situation that happens sometimes in chess. A player sets a trap and gets very excited when his opponent falls for it. Unfortunately, the euphoria is very short-lived since it turns out that there is a big hole in the tr...
Throughout all of chess history, so-called super tournaments have always had their own honorary place. That's why even today we still remember Hastings 1895, New York 1924, Montreal 1979, and many others. What's the main attraction of all these ...
I know, many of you, my dear readers, chuckled reading the title of this article. You must be thinking: "Are you really going to teach us how to play like a computer? Can you play like a computer?" The answer is quite obvious, no I cannot play lik...
GM Ray Robson recently won the 2022 Puzzle Battle World Championship for the third consecutive year. To achieve this incredible feat, he had to outperform players like none other than GMs Hikaru Nakamura, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Shakhriyar Mamedya...
The 2022 Puzzle Battle World Championship is here. It's at times like these that we can catch a glimpse of what true puzzle-solving excellence looks like. It's not often that you can sit back, relax, and watch 50+ puzzles get solved in three minut...
PogChamps 4 presented by Coinbase is over and we already miss it. Who doesn't love to see some of the most entertaining content creators blundering their pieces, stalemating with minutes to spare on the clock, and commentators losing their minds? ...
It is not a secret that most inexperienced chess players love checks. I guess it makes them feel empowered. This is why GM Bobby Fischer famously said: "Patzer sees a check, gives a check." I am not going to discuss here the obvious point that jus...
The FIDE World Cup 2021 is like a breath of fresh air after the series of tournaments where we see the same players playing the same openings achieving mostly the same results. The match between GMs Michal Krasenkow and Praggnanandhaa R, in partic...
Competitive chess is a very demanding activity. It requires players to constantly keep the highest level of concentration, stay calm under the pressure and be creative throughout the whole fight. Unsurprisingly, each game has its own story. I have...
