Many of you have requested before that I put the text of the whole game here. The reason why I prefer fragments instead of full games is that by putting the whole game one can get distracted by other parts less relevant to the given topic. I mean ...
Mikhail Tal was on his way to the world championship when he faced Milko Bobotsov on his way to beconing the first Bulgarian grandmaster. Tal played the King's Indian Defense which Bobotsov challenged with the Saemisch Variation characterized by f...
I would like to talk about a case when two knights are stronger than two bishops. The obvious case is when the position is closed – there are no open diagonals for the bishops and many outposts for the knights. This article addresses the other cas...
This game was from the last round of the Continental Championship in Brazil. After my loss to Vescovi (analyzed in my last article), I had 4/6. I then proceeded to struggle horribly, scoring only 1/3 against lower-rated opposition. I won my 10th r...
What is a chess genius? I cannot answer this question but I can give examples of the play of a chess genius. I came from the country where no one questioned whether this person is a genius or not; it was accepted he is. The games that I will pre...
In my last tournament in Brazil (the Pan-American Continental Championship), I started with a solid 4.0/5 and in round 6 had the black pieces against GM Giovanni Vescovi. I was expecting 1.e4, but as he plays pretty much everything with the white ...
I would like to offer a set of examples to solve. In all of them you have to evaluate some exchanges and make if not the strongest move, then the most practical decision. Some of the examples are very hard, therefore set yourself enough time, I ...
My last tournament in Brazil was a bit of a disaster, but I still played a few games that I think will be of use to show. In the first game I want to show you, my opponent played one of the oldest known openings, the Giuoco Piano. However, the lin...
When we think of the way people played chess in the late 1800s we think of insane sacrifices and attacks that faced almost no resistance. Names like Pilsbury and Morphy, of great imaginative players come to mind. In the early 1900s there was Hyper...
The 2008 World Championship match between Anand and Kramnik was largely decided based on one opening - the Meran Variation of the Semi-Slav. Anand scored two victories in games 3 and 5, as black, that carried him to an insurmountable lead. In th...
World class chess coach Joseph Dorfman in his book “Method in Chess” discusses the importance of exchange in a chess game. He came up with a method that can be applied to evaluate any position. The method is easy to apply and consists...
In my last article, I showed my game with GM Josh Friedel from round 2 of the World Open in Philadelphia. The following day, I had the black pieces against IM Ray Robson, the 2009 Samford Fellowship recipient. I had planned to play a Winawer Frenc...
Recently, I studied GM Viktor Kortschnoj’s book “My 55 Wins with Black” (Russian version of it). I found it to be an excellent learning source. Kortchnoj goes into details of his decision-making process, explains positional concepts, and gives dee...
I would like to talk about a particular situation, which usually happens out of the Hedgehog opening. Black has a6, b6, d6 and e6 pawn structure and white tries to attack the d6 pawn with a bishop maneuver to f4, while his major pieces are already...
This time I would like to deviate slightly from my usual topic of exchanges. I recently thought of pieces that make exceptionally huge numbers of moves during the game. Particularly, a queen can cross the whole board creating threats. In this arti...
Not every attack ends in mate in under 30 moves. Some attacks go through phases, where goals are accomplished in parts and acheiving one goal leads to the creation of a new goal. This pattern may be repeated several times in one game. And tacti...
This article will deviate a little from the exchange topic. I would like to address the topic of outposts. An outpost is a square, usually on the opponent’s side of the board that is attacked by our pawn but cannot be protected by the opponent’s p...
In my last two articles, I showed two of my games from the Quebec Invitational in Montreal. With this article, I hope to wrap up the tournament with my last round game as black against GM Mark Bluvshtein. Going into the game, Mark was in clear fi...
I sit in a room without air-condition on the top floor of a building. It gets pretty hot, since the outside temperature is rather high, plus the roof is conducting heat. Being helpless in a given situation I ended up in makes me think in chess ter...
I know that its much more interesting to study wild attacks then the stubborn defense. I am an attacker who likes to attack even if I see that my combinations are dubious, and I won a countless of times even though I find refutation for my combina...
In my younger years, I had a headache when there were too many pawns in the center and too many possible captures. With white pawns on d4, c4 and black on d5, c5 my thought process went like this: I take on c5, he takes back, oh no he takes on c4 ...
Hi everyone I want to tell you something about winning mentality. I personaly think that this kind of mentality is very important in every day life, in other sports and also in chess. I was training basketball for about 7 years and in that time I ...
I just finished playing in a reasonably strong round-robin in Montreal. I finished with 6.5/9 in the category 7 field (2411 FIDE average). In the third round, I played an interesting game with IM Thomas Roussel-Roozmon. The game was not perfect by...
Hi everyone! in a world of advanced chess eengines and sophisticated programs like Rybka, Zappa and HIARCS etc..., do you remember the old fashioned chessmaster and his funny personnalities and their odd names? ok, this time , i will represent y...
