Chess is a competitive game and those who play it like to win. But it’s not always so easy when your opponent is hell-bent on winning too. If you want to win more games, more tournaments, more prizes and perhaps […]
Hou Yifan and the Bizarre 5 Move Loss
Women’s World Champion Hou Yifan (2644 Elo) played a shocking game in the final round of the Tradewise Gibraltar chess tournament, resigning after just 5 moves – the quickest loss by a Grandmaster. Of more interest was just how bad […]
Instructive Rook Endgames: Nakamura – Giri
Hikaru Nakamura and Anish Giri played out an instructive Rook endgame at the Grand Chess Tour Paris Blitz event this year. Material is level but Nakamura (White) has his Rook ideally placed behind his pawn and his King is helping […]
The 5 people you meet in online blitz chess
Blitz chess: fast, exciting and fun. Who cares if it doesn’t do much for your overall game? Blitz is about reactions, pattern recognition and speed of both thought and movement. As long as you don’t confuse it with actual chess […]
The 6 Types of Chess Player – Which one are you?
Yuri Averbakh, Russian GM, author, endgame expert and currently the world’s oldest living GM at 93 (!), revealed in a 1997 interview in New in Chess that he placed chess players into 6 categories. Here they are with his description […]
Nakamura beats Bareev in 11 moves as Black!
An interesting miniature occurred at the Millionaire Chess tournament recently. The game was a rapid tiebreak between Evgeny Bareev (2669) and Hikaru Nakamura (2812). The position shown was reached after Bareev tried to capitalize on the undefended h5 Knight with […]
Bobby Fischer: Icelandic Kibitzer!
In 2006, the Icelandic TV station Ríkisútvarpið RUV broadcast a rapid match between masters Arnar Gunnarson and Bragi Thorfinsson in which the position below was reached. Gunnarson, playing Black and short of time, picked up his King before noticing the move would […]
Wesley So and the forfeit
In the ninth round of the US Chess Championships 2015 Wesley So was spectacularly and controversially forfeited after just 6 moves for writing notes on a sheet of paper. This incident brought a lot of other things to light, some […]
Missing ideas when calculating.
I had a couple of games this week that saw me miss things during calculation. Fairly simple things that should have been seen. The problem wasn’t one of awareness, ie. not looking for tactics, I found some ideas but missed […]