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...
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...
After my tournament in Montreal, I went to Philly to play the 7-day schedule of the World Open. The 7-day featured a pretty small group of players, most of whom were above 2500! After a draw with GM Vladimir Potkin (2721 USCF) in round 1, I got th...
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...
Kasparov has written about chess as a game of "material, time, and quality" on a few occasions. Material is pretty straightforward - just count up the pieces on the board. By my understanding, time refers to more dynamic factors in the position, n...
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...
On my last tournament run in Europe, I had the good fortune of checkmating two opponents with a pair of minor pieces (bishop and knight and then two bishops). There were other pieces on the board, but the minor pieces did the heavy lifting. With t...
Of my last few tournaments, my best result was definitely at San Sebastian, Spain in April. I tied for first there with an undefeated 7.0/9. I included one of my earlier games (against FM Angel Arribas Lopez) in an article titled "Spicing up the E...
My normal weapon as Black against 1.e4 has been the French Defense for many years. A couple years ago, I started playing the Ruy Lopez as Black as well, but I still tend to choose the French against lower-rated opponents. Unlike the Ruy Lopez wher...
(Editor's note: Due to a lengthy tour of European tournaments, GM Bhat will miss a couple weeks in his column. For those interested in his results and some of his games, you may wish to check out his blog, http://vbhat.wordpress.com/ . You should ...
One of the dilemmas of modern chess is that opening theory has grown to huge proportions. The advent of computers and databases mean that there is plenty of information about a player's tendencies, strengths, weaknesses, etc. Throw in some strong ...
When I used to attend the chess class at the Fremont Public Library every Friday afternoon, Richard Shorman often used to show us the games of Morphy and Capablanca. I tend to play crazy games these days (see the game with Bobras), but that sort o...
For those of you folllowing David Pruess's blog here on chess.com, you'll know that 4 of us from the Bay Area went to play in Cappelle la Grande, France. Before the tournament, we spent a few days in Paris, where one of Jesse's friends (Jason Ston...
One thing that I try pretty hard to do after playing a tournament these days is to go through all my games and annotate them. There are various things I'm looking for, but here's a quick list: (1) Did the opening go according to plan? If not, fig...
Last week, I annotated a win over GM Nidjat Mamedov (viewable here). While the game against Mamedov may have made that line of the King's Indian look like a forced win for White, chess is rarely that simple. Continuing with the same theme of the b...
How do you think when you get to a quiet position? Do you try and calculate a lot of variations, or do you try to make long-term plans? Normally, in the absence of a lot of tactics, these are the sorts of positions where strategic thinking trumps ...
Hello everyone - this is my first article for chess.com, and in my weekly column, I'm going to focus on my own games, trying to explain my thoughts for your benefit. Feel free to leave questions and comments. If there's something you'd like to se...
