I am going to begin a series on the positional exchange sacrifice, consisting of several articles. There are of course many different possible justifications for an exchange sacrifice, and I cannot cover all of them. But we will be focusing on a f...
This week we are wrapping up the overview of my play from the U.S. Women's Championship. The last two articles featured the first six games and today we will look at the key moments from the last three games. With this article I would like to con...
In my previous article we looked at the first three games from the U.S. Women's Championship. This article will cover the next three rounds I played. In the round-robin format all the participants play each other, so it seems the order doesn't r...
If you have any knowledge of chess history, you have probably heard of the theoretical dispute - and antagonism - between Siegbert Tarrasch and Aron Nimzowitsch, the leaders of the classical and hypermodern schools (respectively). It appears that ...
My next few articles will be about the US Championship that took place from May 2-13th in St. Louis. I was a participant in the women's event, where ten players competed for a purse of $65,000 and the title of US Woman Champion. This event is gran...
Last week I showed a couple of examples of a king hunt. This week we will see another example of a deposed king being chased across the board. First it somewhat willingly steps into the center, with the leader of the white pieces hoping that his o...
Chess openings are a bit like fashion - they follow trends. Certain lines become popular and then just fade away. In most cases, an elite player (or most likely his team) prepares an opening for a tournament and then everyone else follows his lead...
For the next two weeks, I will again return to the theme of Attack and Defense - more specifically, the phenomenon known as the "king hunt." Although nowadays many of us are eating food which is farmed - such as farmed fish, chickens i...
Continuing on the topic of Typical Positions in 1.d4 openings, one cannot not mention Nimzo-Indian Defense! This opening is one of the most complex and the resulting positions can be very hard to handle. In my preparation for the US Women's Champi...
Not all openings require knowledge of specific lines; this is especially true for 1.d4 openings. I have been playing 1.d4 for many years now and with minimum energy spent on openings, I manage to get high scores vs like-rated opponents. This is pr...
Today we will review typical positions where one side varied their move order and combined some well-known ideas to reach a new, completely fresh position. When you are familiar with plans and typical ideas, sometimes you don't need to exactl...
Today we will continue with typical plans arising from the Queens Gambit Declined. I had a chance to experience the lack of knowledge in one critical and very popular line last weekend, while playing in the Philadelphia Open. The game ended favora...
Today we start a new series that will show how modern players understand positions through the lenses of typical strategic plans. The series will span 4-5 articles and cover a range of positions. We will learn to differentiate ideas found at the b...
We are wrapping-up the column on Intuition and I would like to take a look at few games from the Candidates Tournament that is currently underway in London. Carlsen and Aronian are two favorites of the tournament and we will analyze their games an...
With the last few articles we studied Magnus Carlsen's comments after the games from the recent London Classic and analyzed the ones that had to do with intuitive approach towards the position. Today I would like to concentrate of some of the posi...
Last August I wrote an article called "The Knight's Moves", about superhuman (or rather, "superequine") knights which travel the board with amazing activity. But more often a powerful knight takes the form of a "permanent knight" - a knight entren...
Today's article features a fighting game between Nakamura and Carlsen from the recent London Classic tournament. We will concentrate on few critical moments where intuition played a key role and explore how these two strong players with different ...
Today we continue with the topic of Intuition and will look at few moments from the Adams - Carlsen game at the recent London Chess Classic. The game did not go well for Carlsen, as Adams had the initiative throughout the opening, middlegame and m...
The next several articles will be dedicated to the topic of Intuition. What is intuition in chess? It is a concept, hard to define and there can be endless debates about whether a certain decision is intuitive or not. Nevertheless, it is useful to...
This article concludes our series on Key Positions! Last time, we studied how strong players from the past sacrificed pawns positionally. Really what we looked at was one strategic method out of numerous methods used by strong players to achieve g...
Recently, a friend sent me a fantastically crazy game, and I have decided to share it in my column. It was a fairly obscure game, from the Beverwijk tournament of 1961. The position that arose was so incredibly lopsided that it is hard to believe....
Today we will look at few examples from world champions' practice where one side sacrificed a pawn for positional reasons. In some cases this sacrifice was absolutely necessary, while in the other cases it was optional, even questionable. We will ...
Generally speaking there are two types of chess players: optimists and pessimists. The first tend to stay positive and evaluate positions in their favor, while those in the latter category often give the opponent too much credit and underestimate ...
This article will build on the topic of seeing and correctly assessing key positions which we started studying in the previous article. In last week's article we looked at this concept by analyzing a recent endgame. Today we will see several openi...
