It is time for the big national scholastic tournaments here in the U.S., and that means that we are going to witness thousands of kids making similar mistakes on and off the chess board. A clear sign of a person getting older is when he starts c...
"We have to play by the !@#$ rules!" -- Amanda Young, Saw II. In last week's article, we discussed a dangerous strategic concept, the saw. So, what should you do if your opponent turns it against you? Well, as Amanda put it, you should ...
"I want to play a game." -- John '"Jigsaw" Kramer (from the movie Saw). You all probably know this cliche from many horror movies: A group of people are having fun (like a bunch of drunk college kids partying in a remote location), upbeat...
Grandmaster David Bronstein was an excellent chess player, original thinker and a brilliant chess author who produced a number of bestsellers. His most famous chess book is undoubtedly "Zurich 1953." Everyone loves this book and for a good reas...
There are some ideas associated with certain openings. For example, mention a pawn minority attack to any experienced chess player and he will immediately visualize the Carlsbad Variation of the Queen's Gambit Declined. If you ask me to name the...
The summer of 1992 was the most memorable time of my chess career. Our team just took silver medal at the 30th Chess Olympiad in Manila and I felt like I was on the top of the world. That Olympiad deserves a separate article, since I am absolutely...
The touch move rule is the most basic rule of tournament chess. Even people who don't play chess at all know that when a chess player intentionally touches one of his pieces, he must make a move with this piece (of course if such a legal mov...
There are many famous personalities in the history of chess. People talk about them, write books about them and follow their games. But there is an even bigger number of unknown chess players who never achieved any great tournament results or disc...
The year was 1985. Garry Kasparov just became the world champion, and together with his mentor, ex-world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, he was running the first session of the famous Botvinnik-Kasparov school. A group of young aspiring c...
Some chess players love to play offbeat openings. I knew one class-A player who was a die-hard devotee of the Vulture Defense (1.d4 Nf6 2. c4 c5 3. d5 Ne4?!). He was showing me a book (why do they kill trees to publish such books?) that explaine...
The game we are going to analyze today is quite typical for the style of Mikhail Tal. It features sacrifices, crazy attack and a lot of fun! Also, as it happened to many Tal's sacrifices, it was proven incorrect. Of course it took "only" a...
Chess is well known as a game of strategy. This is why it is prominently pictured in all kinds of television commercials that have to showcase long-term planning (e.g. insurance, banking, etc.). It is a popular myth among people who don't play c...
If the title of the article sounds ridiculous, don't rush to a conclusion. I'll try to prove that sometimes even very strong chess players forget the basic rules of chess. Let's talk about castling. Do you remember when it is legal and when it...
There are many basic endgame rules you can find in any chess manual: Centralize your king! Create an outside passed pawn! Rooks should be placed behind passed pawns! ...I bet you've heard them dozens of times. And yet one very...
The last couple of months were a real paradise for true chess aficionados. The world's top events (including the world championship!) followed one after another. Today, I offer you an opportunity to test your chess skills and find the star moves...
Most people are fascinated by optical illusions. Indeed it is a very strange feeling that what you see with your own eyes is not exactly what it is. This reminds me of the punchline to the old joke that I already mentioned in this article: "who ...
The chess world gasped when in game six of this year's world championship match, both Carlsen and Anand missed a simple tactical shot 26...Nxe5! (see #10 in the second part of this series). Some reporters even rushed to call it "the bi...
Before we continue our "hit parade" of blunders, I'd like to thank our readers (and especially FritsFritschy) for their active participation in our discussion about the historic "blunder" in the first game of the Spassky-Fischer match that we...
The world championship match Carlsen-Anand is over now and it brings some relief to me because I was afraid that I might have to expand this collection of blunders. Thankfully, despite being tired, both contenders didn't commit any huge b...
Magnus Carlsen won the 2014 world championship match in game 11 today to defend his title. But the sixth game of the Carlsen-Anand match made waves around the world. Some chess journalists rushed to christen the astonishing m...
In the first part of this article, we discussed how Alexey Shirov discovered a beautiful idea during a postmortem analysis of his game vs. GM Azmaiparashvili. Unexpectedly, he got a chance to use a similar idea in the last round of the sam...
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said: "Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed; in the second it is opposed; in the third it is regarded as self-evident." There are ...
Many folks see the endgame as the most boring part of the game, where it is all about the technique. Even though some endgames require a decent amount of technique and sometimes can look boring for inexperienced chess players, they can still ...
In the previous installment of this series, we discussed the situations where it is beneficial to break one of the cardinal rules of chess: do not push pawns in front of your king. As you could notice, in all the games that we analyzed last time...
