When a Masterpiece Becomes...a Monsterpiece
“Oh, good evening. Me still Alistair Cookie and this still Monsterpiece Theater.” – Sesame Street We’ve all heard that familiar refrain at chess tournaments – “I had a winning position, but then…I blew ...
Short-Kasparov, 1993
As I mentioned in my last article “Chess in Alaska”, when I first began playing chess, the world was busy discussing the world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short. It was being covered in installments in Chess Life magazine, ...
Deep Thought
Any strong chess player must know when to take a deep think, and when to make a move quickly. Time management is critical: you can’t be too fast, you can’t be too slow. Here are the three typical situations when you might want to take your time: ...
Chess in Alaska
A funny thing happened on the way back to Serbia this year. I flew in to Budapest because tickets there were cheaper than to Belgrade. After spending a night there, I got on the train south and east to Novi Sad. I went into a cabin which had two o...
Attack and Defense in the Dragon
There are different schools of thought on how a chess player should structure their opening repertoire. Many of the top players nowadays seem to play a huge variety of different openings, each picked to match a particular opponent or a particular ...
The King Hunt
Last December I sold my car, which I had owned for a little over four years. It was a 1997 Nissan Altima, and it had taken me on many trips to chess tournaments in places as far away (from Philadelphia, where I lived) as Ohio, Kentucky, and North ...
Dark and Light Square Weaknesses
Maybe you have heard of light and dark-square strategy. It is associated with exploiting weak squares of a certain color in the opponent’s camp. The main reason why squares can become weak is lack of control over them by pawns. If, additio...
Fighting Defense
Chess isn’t all about winning games as if proving mathematical theorems. It isn’t all about obtaining an advantage through superior preparation and then using technique to coast to victory. A big part of chess strength is craftiness in the heat of...
Just Played...
If you follow my column, you will notice that I have not often been covering the most recent games from top-level tournaments. I don’t really want to annotate the same game that other commentators (and their computers) have already picked ap...
Uncovering a Tactical Weakness
Tactics naturally flow from “tactical weaknesses” – an unguarded piece, an exposed king, two heavy pieces on the same line, etc. Often this weakness is out in the open and the only question is if it can be utilized. But occasiona...
Attack and Defense in the Modern Benoni
The Benoni Defense was first mentioned – and got its name – from an 1825 manuscript by Aaron Reinganum, Ben-oni, or the Pawn-Sacrifice Defense in Chess. The word “benoni” means “son of sorrow” in Hebrew. Accordi...
The Central Counterattack
Everyone has heard the saying “an attack on the wing should be met by a counter in the center”. Or, if you haven’t – now you have. But what does a central counterattack look like, and why is it so strong? Every attack uses up some kind of energy,...
The Young Alekhine
Every once in a while, someone asks me the question “who is your favorite player?” That’s always a difficult question to answer, because I don’t really have a single favorite player. If I have to name one, though, I would probably say Alexander Al...
A Comedy of Errors (Or, The Tempo of the Attack, 2)
The game I will show you today is – as you could guess from the title of the article – a comedy of errors. And the source of those errors is a surprising misjudgment of the “speed” of play (for more on this subject, check o...
The Boss Takes Matters Into His Own Hands
It’s rare to see the king going on the attack, especially in the middlegame with queens on the board. However, it can happen and when it does it is usually aesthetic and shocking. We learn early on to protect the king, and quickly begin to see hi...
Space and the Attack
What is “space” on a chess board? And why is it so important? A simple answer to the first question is that space is “control of squares”. So a player with a “space advantage” is one who controls a greater number of squares. This could even be du...
Positional Sacrifice
A positional sacrifice implies giving away material for long-term positional advantages. Such exchange operations don’t lead to a straightforward win of the game or material. While any piece can be positionally sacrificed, the most common victims ...
Brilliant Sustained Defense
I would like to show a game in this week’s article which really amazed me when I first saw it. In the 36th Soviet Championship a fairly little-known player Igor Platonov took on the legend of attack, Mikhail Tal. Playing the Najdorf Sicili...
Attack and Defense in Balance
Probably the vast majority of games you will see in articles on chess.com or other places end decisively. But overall, at least in the higher levels of chess, the majority actually end in draws. We have been seeing mostly games where the balance w...
Under Cover of Bishop
There are certain kinds of positions where one particularly well-placed piece leads the entire action, like a conductor in a symphony. We chess players always try to put our pieces in good places, but it is more difficult than it seems. A piece th...
Intuition and the Sacrifice
How do you know if a sacrifice is correct or incorrect? In the absence of a calculable forced line leading to mate or winning back the material – how can you assess whether the compensation is enough? Let’s look at the following position: Wh...
Defensive Thinking...When You Are Attacking?!
I want to discuss today a subject that is crucial to the chess player who wants to improve – this is “defensive thinking” – also known as “prophylaxis”. It is strange that this subject is sometimes presented as ...
Defending Against the Barbecue Sacrifice
This week I am going to discuss a particular kind of sacrifice. This is usually a piece for one or two pawns. There are no clear-cut immediate threats and the defending side has many possible defenses. However, the defender’s king is perpetu...
The Queenless Attack
I have always found attacks on the king in which the queen does not take part (usually because she has been traded or sacrificed) to be quite artistic. Why is this? I think it’s because to conduct an attack on the king without the help of the quee...