This post is a word of warning for the average club player. As the chess world is becoming increasingly salesy, snake oil marketing is becoming more and more the norm. It is time to reconsider how much you trust titled players. The good old ...
This is the first post in a series of the most typical mistakes I encounter as a chess coach. I thought it might be useful to share it on this blog. OK, so let’s start with this one. Defending against unsound attacks It is one of th...
I saw a Chessable ad recently which is so hilarious that it really deserves a post. Inadvertently, they have created the perfect parody of modern chess marketing. I recommend you to watch the short video below, because it shows what can happen t...
There seems to be a plethora of articles about chess styles on the major chess websites. If you read those articles, you get an embarrassingly long list of different styles to pick from. Just to name a few, you could be: tactical, position...
This post is about another common mistake I see a lot as a chess coach. Pretty much all my students do it from time to time, and some of them are especially prone to it; so I thought it might be useful to write about it. ...
This is just a quick post is about one of the most common mistakes chessplayers make when calculating variations. I see it happening all the time while doing calculation exercises with my students; and of course, I used to make it a lot myself whe...
I wrote a blog post about threats recently, and someone asked in a comment if there were any training methods to improve their threat handling. This is a very good an important questions. We all know from experience that knowing and understandin...
Dealing with threats in chess is not a skill that comes naturally. It has to be learnt. Or even better, the natural reaction to threats has to be unlearnt. This is an area where I always see huge differences between beginners and advanced players,...
If you never had a coach, you might wonder why chess coaches are so obsessed about analysing their students' games. Surely we have the engines to do that?! It must be an old-fashioned thing from coaches who are not really up-to-date, right? Well...
This blog was on hold for a while, as I had a lot of work with my students, the garden, the house - so something had to give way. Well, at least I can post all my league games in one go, as the team championship has ended meanwhile. Our team ...
Well, better late than never: this is my first league game from the 2022/2023 season, played three weeks ago. Our opponent was Nagyatád, one of the strongest teams in our division. After signing a couple of new players for this year, they l...
In my last post I wrote about how we moved to a little town close to Pécs, and it turned out that this little town, Szentlőrinc, has a chess team which plays in the second league of Hungary. The way I found the team was actually quite int...
It has been a while since I updated this blog. It has always been my intention to continue it, but life got in the way. So this is just a quick update on what happened to me while this blog was in coma. The most important thing is that me ...
Simplification is one of those deceptively simple chess principles. You hear it once and you think you are done with it: OK, when a piece up, just swap off everything and win the endgame. What could be more obvious than that? Still, as a chess c...
I decided to write a post about cross-pins because quite a few of my students said that they never heard about the idea before our lessons. Of course, there is nothing new under the sun: while I was collecting material for this post, I discovered ...
The weekend before last I participated in the Bangor Congress 2019, a 6 round rapid tournament which has been revived after a 14 year break, thanks to the energetic organiser, Brendan Jameson and his team. Tournament Organiser/Arbiter Bre...
This is a game from userfriendly2, who posted it on the forum, asking for help with the analysis. I think the game is quite instructive, and White's mistakes are rather typical, so I decided to write a post about it. I added my comments to userfri...
In this post I would like to show you an old game of mine, which I played in 2013 in Dublin in the Irish National Club Championship. I was playing for Galway, and my opponent was another Hungarian, IM Tibor Károlyi, who happened to ...
There are a lot of chess principles we hear all the time, but don’t necessarily understand, or never really investigate. The purpose of these posts is to take a closer look of those principles, and examine the logic behind them. One ...
This is a game from Giasira, who posts his games regularly under the topic "Road to 1600 Rapid, trying to improve after every game". His last game was a loss, and must have been a painful one, as he had such an overwhelming advantage at one poin...
There are a lot of chess principles we hear all the time, but don’t necessarily understand, or never really investigate. The purpose of these posts is to take a closer look of those principles, and examine the logic behind them. Our ...
I just checked recently the old tournament games of my very first online student, and wanted to share some of them with you. My student is a ten years old little girl from England. I started to give her face to face lessons two years ag...
In this post I would like share with you a nice attacking game which I played recently in the Morra gambit. Although the Morra is not my main weapon against the Sicilian, I teach it to my young students, so I have to play it from time to time...
Freehealthcare published this game on the forums, asking why he lost the endgame, as it did not look so bad. Well, the main reason was apparently a misplaced rook on b2 that got into trouble. We all have heard that we should develop our...
