Good tactical skills are all about pattern recognition. If, for example, you have solved a dozen 'back rank checkmate' problems, then I can guarantee that next time you play a tournament game and your opponent doesn't create a luft for his King by...
In Part I and Part II we were discussing the first four rounds of the Russian Team Chess Championship ’12. A few important clashes have happened already, but the most critical rounds are usually the final ones. The teams were competing not only fo...
Let me start with a disclaimer: I cannot read other people's minds. It would be extremely helpful in many different activities but especially so when you play chess. The good news is, sometimes you don't even need to guess your opponent's th...
Part I was published last week. The third round became the duel of heavyweights. SHSM-64 vs Tomsk-400, St. Petersburg vs Ugra. Saratov was facing a solid team Nagivator (Moscow) with Sutovsky and Sasikiran on the top boards. Given the short dista...
Recently it has become fashionable to criticize FIDE. Indeed, some of the FIDE inventions could be featured in the "you cannot make this up" column. But they definitely managed to achieve one goal: chess is 'rediscovered' by the media. Wheth...
The traditional Russian Team Chess Championship (both men’s and women’s divisions) was held from April 8th to 16th in the Loo district of the resort city Sochi on the coast of the Black sea. From 2005 to 2011 I have been playing in the women’s tou...
Chess players are very superstitious people! Almost every strong player I know has his own superstition. By far the most common one is a "lucky" pen or pencil. Even Mikhael Tal (who had the nickname "the Magician") half jokingly blamed the loss of...
In the first part of this article we discussed the cases where two Bishops are a very powerful weapon. We also analyzed Steinitz's games where the first World Champion showed the correct way to take advantage of the Bishop pair. In the next ...
This is a rather entertaining game that features the pin quite often. After an interesting opening, both kings are exposed, which leads to a rater double-edged fight in which both players fight to stay alive and checkmate the other side first. Ehl...
About 30 years ago I was playing in a kid's team tournament. I don't remember who won the tournament, my own result or even who played there. The only thing I remember about the tournament is what happened during one of our team's gatherings...
There are many openings where you fianchetto your Bishop (i.e. you develop your Bishop to g2 for White or to g7 for Black). There your Bishop is going to control the long diagonal and offer an extra protection for your King. But what is that? Your...
If I ever create a list of things I tell my students most frequently, then the title of today's article would be at the very top. We all make mistakes ( read my series of articles on the subject here: http://www.chess.com/article/view/to-err-is-hu...
Do you remember this memorable line from the 1999 blockbuster "The Sixth Sense": Cole Sear (played by Haley Joel Osment) says: I see dead people... They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't k...
It is well known fact that we learn the most from the games that we lost. But you need to analyze all of your games because sometimes a draw can teach you more than a bunch of losses. I want to present two draws that definitely helped ...
In the previous two parts of this series, we have already established the fact that you really need to analyze your games in order to find your mistakes so you'll never repeat them again. Unfortunately, you don't always realize the true reason for...
In the first part of this article we saw examples where chess players didn't learn from their mistakes and therefore they were falling for the same traps again and again. Here is one of the most amazing stories. It started in 1971 in the traditio...
We all make mistakes. In my opinion it is just a natural way to self improvement, so you shouldn't be ashamed of your mistakes. As a roughly translated Russian saying goes "Only a person who does nothing makes no mistakes". Therefore I want to tha...
This game is extremely weird and entertaining at the same time. Both players try to push through a mass of pawns to promotion, black on the queenside and white in the center. Black promotes two (!) times and at the end has two queens for a rook. Y...
The playing styles of two chess giants GM Aron Nimzowitsch and the World Champion Tigran Petrosian have many similarities. It is not just a coincidence since Petrosian was a diligent student of Nimzowitsch's books, and especially his iconic "...
As the well-known legend goes, Ernest Hemingway once won a bet that he could write a short story which would have just six words. You see this story as the title of this article. It is a perfect story indeed: it has a beginning, a middle and ...
It's been two month since we did our first tactical Super-Test, so now it is time to check your chess skills again and compare them to the best players in chess history! Let me remind you that unlike typical tactical tests, here in most of the pu...
Last week we analyzed games where it was wise to spend a whole tempo and play h2-h3 (or h7-h6 for Black) to avoid a very unpleasant pin. But sometimes it is a good idea to play such a move even if the pin is not our concern at all. In order to un...
Today I am going to talk about the h2-h3 (h7-h6 for Black) move in an opening. Let me tell you right away that in the majority of the cases when my students (mostly kids) play this move, it means only one thing: they find themselves in an unfamil...
In the first part of this article we started analysis of the classical position with an Isolated Queen Pawn where Black's e6-pawn is moved to c6. This kind of position happened in many games of the famous match La Bourdonnais - McDonnell. Tod...
