Oh, boy, I got myself in trouble again. Where to start? Well, with the King's Indian Defense. But where does the name come from? We have all sorts of "Indian" Defences....King's Indian, Queen's Indian, Nimzo-Indian, Bogo-Indian, etc.... It's a...
Hello, everyone.....just a few random thoughts. I have been inspired to do this particular blog post by two games.....one by Arjun Erigaisi, from the last Olympiad, and the second one by Praggnanandhaa..... Now, Arjun played the Steinitz Deferre...
Petrosian has been qualified by some as a "Mysterious" player. Some people classify him as a positional player with a super-cautious style. Spassky, however, who played two World Championship matches with Petrosian, considered Petrosian to be a ...
(I started working on this blog post in May, 2022.......) This post has been "cooking" for a few weeks now; for some reason the world's upheavals have shaken me to the core, and caused an extra-reflective mood to set in; our heart mirrors the wo...
Dear chess lovers, there is a story that one time a Master was analyzing a position and Alekhine took up the opposite side. After a while, Alekhine said, "I can win from the opposite side of the original position", and proceeded to beat this Maste...
Hi, chess lovers...I don't have much time these days, but wanted to share again a "chess coincidence". Recently, in the Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Arjun Erigaisi played the Blumenfeld Gambit! Now, White can accept the pawn...... ...
Dear chess lovers, just a moment to share something, in my free-association way! GM David Bronstein wrote a wonderful book called "200 Open Games". These are all games that start with 1.e4 e5. The book is very well organized, and ...
First of all, this blog post will expose my ignorance in ways that I don't even know ("you don't know what you don't know"). Second of all, I just want to share with you, once again, a commonality of patterns.....I wanted to title this post "Bot...
What kids do now with engines, I did with blitz games with my friends, and weekly tournaments. My short journey in chess started in 1972, when the chess fever of the Spassky-Fischer WC Match caught on. In my country, Puerto Rico, we had that and...
Hi, everyone! The following game is from the 1925 Moscow International Tournament. It is found in page 214 of the following book: I highly recommend this book. It is rich in content. Will definitely help any of us to improve our game. As ...
In the following two games we will see a similar theme...sacrificing the Queen for an attack from the Black side of the Ruy. Both these games are featured in the book by Pablo Iglesias: Game 1- Ljubojevic-Planinc Game 2...
Today, leafing through Isaac Linder's wonderful book on Wilhelm Steinitz I came across a profile about Alexander Petrov, ALEXANDER PETROV(born Feb-12-1794, died Apr-22-1867, 73 years old) Russia PRONUNCIATION: "Alexande...
Some positions in chess look like the ultimate chess fantasy....for example, the following final position (after ....Ng1#!) The position looks like a composition, not a practical game, yet it is one more example of Planinc's virtuosity in ...
My good friend Simaginfan has introduced me to quite a few great chess players. One of these is Howard Staunton: HOWARD STAUNTON(1810-1874) United Kingdom "Howard Staunton was born in Westmorland, Northern England. Learning the game in 1830...
When the idea came for this blog, it was just about the game Barcza-Planinc.....but thinking about Planinc, and looking at the wonderful book by Pablo Iglesias, ....which I recommend highly, by the way, you come across quite a few jewels by t...
Hello! I hope you are alright, that everyone is in good health and good spirits. Certain points about chess keep coming to me; certain points of wisdom or philosophical points about our game which have come to me over time. By time I mean 50 yea...
Hi, chess lovers.... Just found, by chance, another pattern in common between Rubinstein and Tal. It is uncanny how similar the particular maneuver is! The first game is from St. Petersburg, 1909, a tournament organized to honor the great Mi...
When you study the games of the Great Masters of the past, it becomes easier to understand what players are doing in the present. Two contradictory things are happening at the same time: The younger generation, deluded by the "intelligence" or "...
I am finding difficulty defining this post, and that is the main reason for the title. My first intention was to center the post around the Geller-Mikadze game, and its comparison to its predecessor, the Keres-Smyslov game. But then, as I was bu...
In 1974 Karpov faced Korchnoi in the Candidates' Final, to decide who would play Bobby Fischer for the World Championship in 1975. Recently, in the comments section of one of my recent blog posts, https://www.chess.com/blog/kamalakanta/vidit-p...
Dear chess lovers, in the recent FIDE Candidates' Tournament 2024, Praggnanandhaa played the ....f5 variation against Vidit's Ruy Lopez. In the chessgames.com database, the first instance of this opening being played is a correspondence game from ...
Sergey Voronkov has published a three-volume set of books titled "Masterpieces and Dramas of the Soviet Championships". These books are masterpieces of chess literature and chess history. Each chapters has, before the actual games shown, stori...
Sometimes it takes generations to find the truth in a position. In his book, Issac Lipnitsky gives the following position: and writes: "In the diagram position White's pawn centre is more of a weakness than a strength, as it consta...
Sometimes an idea or pattern will strike your mind like lightning. You see it and do a double-take: "What was that?" And then you realize you saw it before, but in a different way. Position 1: Position 2: So, this is the m...
Where do I start? So many thoughts to share on one simple theme....pushing the e-pawn! But of course, there is more to it than that. This article ties Keres and Euwe, Bronstein and Gukesh in one theme..... The funny thing is that I have been t...
