My first reaction when I learned about the book Improve Your Chess at any Age was one of sheer jealousy: some club player writing a book about chess improvement?! How unfair! There must be thousands of club players around the world who'd want the ...
On the day the Dutch cabinet of ministers resigned over an issue about sending new troops to Afghanistan, three chess events were being held in Amsterdam, capital of The Netherlands. One was the second round of the annual Batavia Max Euwe Challeng...
The Dutch quarterly Matten provides a mixture of interviews, stories and anecdotes with a literary flavour, interweaved with drawings, cartoons and photos. We bring a review of the 7th edition in the Dutch language, together with a review of De Pi...
On ChessCafe, an English translation of three sonnets on chess by Vladimir Nabokov has been published. According to John Roycroft, it is 'the first English verse translation of the trio of linked chess sonnets that Vladimir Nabokov published in th...
Herman Grooten's outstanding Chess Strategy for Club Players - The Road to Positional Advantage has won the ChessCafe Book of the Year 2009 Award. After four weeks of voting, Grooten's book beat Viktor Moskalenko's Revolutionize Your Chess and Dav...
What do a game of chess and a nude decending a staircase have in common? To answer such questions, you must be prepared to leave your conventional ways of thinking at home and then fall down Marcel Duchamp's rabbit-hole of chess and art.A few week...
There’s a picture of Mikhail Tal that has always seemed to me the ultimate chess player’s pose: Tal's looking at the board, chin on his thumb, his other arm folded under his fist, utter determination in his eyes. But what was Tal actually thinking...
Magnus Carlsen has won Corus 2010. In the last round he drew Fabiano Caruana and both Kramnik and Shirov also drew their games, the latter after accepting Dominguez' offer in a winning position. Anish Giri won the B group and Li Chao took C.The Co...
Chess players, perhaps insisting on their world-wide status as 'smart people', have always seemed to me more formalistic and pedantic than your average customer at the grocery's. But sometimes being 'wrong' is much more fun.How do you spell 'Korc...
Here's a confession: I've had Viktor Moskalenko's latest book Revolutionize Your Chess in my possession for weeks already, but I've been reluctant to review it. The reason, quite simply, is this: I don't like it at all. I loved Moskalenko's previo...
Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist and the recent How We Decide, has an interesting blog post on the recent TIME profile of Magnus Carlsen (about which we also reported). According to Lehrer, the use of computers actually enhances...
Although not too convincingly, Alexei Shirov also won his 4th game in Wijk aan Zee, against Jan Smeets. Going into the first rest day, the Spaniard from Latvia leads with 4/4, a full point ahead of Carlsen, Nakamura and Ivanchuk, who defeated Loek...
Following several initiatives in the chess world, ChessVibes takes the one-time opportunity to ask your help for the victims of the recent earthquake in Haïti. The website of the United States Chess Federation reports a simultaneous exhibition in ...
How would you fare as a chessplayer being transported back in time? Would your contemporary theoretical opening knowledge pay off? Would your understanding of modern ideas in chess strategy trump older concepts about chess? These questions came in...
Every chess player, no matter how weak, has a high point in his career. Mine occurred in May 2007, during the last round of the Dutch Team Chess Championship. I was playing in the Master League, the highest level in Dutch chess, and I was surround...
Yesterday TIME featured a short interview with the new world's new number 1 Magnus Carlsen. Despite the fact that there were only ten questions with relatively short answers, I liked it so much that it got me thinking about chess journalism in gen...
No matter how much criticism Vladimir Nabokov's posthumously published The Orginal of Laura recently received, I instantly bought the book - and liked it all the same. Some writers are just always worth reading. In contemporary chess literature, a...
With the first decade drawing to a close, many sites look back on the past ten years and publish their lists of ‘greatest’ movies and books, most influential people, most important historical events and most significant technological developments....
Are chess books getting better? Take the first volume of The Complete Hedgehog by Sergey Shipov: although I've read many books on the Hedgehog system, I think this is the best one by far. It's more accessible, better explained, better written, it'...
Chess is interesting, and chess openings are interesting too. There is nothing scary about opening theory, but there is nothing sacred about it either. This is the message Paul van der Sterren wants to give his readers in his 468-page book Fundame...
Now that I've finally accepted that I probably won't be World Chess Champion, it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to set goals in chess. What's worse, I've noticed I am trying to force my will upon my opponents by different means than winn...
Do you like to watch porn? Sorry, different question. Do you like feel-good movies? Many people don’t like to admit this, perhaps because they know the world is really a very cruel place, but I think there can’t be much wrong with feeling good abo...
I am one of those people who, despite all the obvious advantages, dislikes virtual music libraries. I need to have the actual albums to get a feeling for the music, which otherwise sounds utterly inpersonal to me. Call me old-fashioned, but for th...
As soon as I finished the first paragraph of the introduction to Jesus de la Villa's new book Dismantling the Sicilian, published by New in Chess - one of the most amazing first paragraphs I've ever read in a chess book - I thought: this book is e...
