Dear readers! Over the next couple months I will be doing a series of articles covering the endgames played in world championship matches over the years. Through this series, we will be seeing how endgame play evolved as well as learning about som...
Two minor pieces against a rook - a very tricky material balance. In one situation, a rook and pawn defeats the two minor pieces. In another, two minor pieces run circles around a rook and two - or even three, as we see in today's game - pawns. An...
A material imbalance in the endgame provides an unusual type of play. Here we watch the spectacle of pieces, each with different capabilities, fighting, trying to change the terrain to their own advantage. It is like two knights on horseback fight...
For the second part of this series, we will turn to the classical master of defense - Emanuel Lasker. Lasker had an unusual skill for hanging on in the most difficult of positions while simultaneously goading his opponents into the abyss. Each mov...
There's no denying that, whatever your strength in chess, in some games you are going to have to cling to some floating debris just to stay over water. Anyone can fall into some opening preparation or make a blunder. Additionally, you have those g...
Wrapping up my series about endgames from the Sicilian, we will be discussing the relevance of the major open lines in that structure: the c- and d-files. In the basic Open Sicilian structure, White generally has primacy on the d-file and Black ...
In this article, I will be discussing another archetypal Sicilian endgame. This one occurs after White occupies d5 with a knight which is then traded off and recaptured by exd5. This structure frequently arises from the Dragon, Accelera...
In various lines of the Sicilian, Black plays ...a6 and ...b5, which sometimes gives White the chance to sacrifice a minor piece on b5. The knight that ends up on b5 subsequently captures on d6, the queens are traded, and a typical endgame arises....
In the Sicilian, we tend to think of the queenside as Black's domain. Black's open c-file, which allows real pressure on c2 as well as support for a knight on c4, along with the easy possibility of expanding on the queenside by ...b5, generally gi...
I will begin a series of article on various endgames arising from the Open Sicilian. The endgames share certain characteristic features - especially the trade of White's d-pawn for Black's c-pawn, giving Black two center pawns against one. Black h...
The Philadelphia Open recently concluded in my home city with the victory of the top seed, former world championship challenger, Gata Kamsky. Kamsky has a very unusual style, a style which I think many people neither understand or appreciate. I ...
In a recent tournament, one game reached a certain ending which I had previously played a full eight years ago. That was a decent memory of a very different time. I wasn't even an IM yet, and I was still trying to establish a life in Philadelphia ...
In last week's article, A Week in Chicago, Part 1, we saw a very strange and interesting game I played against the young FM Eric Rosen in a Chicago international tournament. Now let's look at what happened later in the tournament. As I said befo...
I recently participated in an IM norm tournament in Chicago. This was an unusual kind of tournament for me - and you might find it strange that a tournament for international master norms would have grandmasters. Most of the tournaments in which I...
Imagining that the pieces have stable values which are written in stone is an oversimplification of chess. One of the ways to become a better player is to develop a more subtle understanding of the relative values of pieces. Often a piece gains ...
In the first part of my series on Emanuel Lasker's endgame play, we saw how he began the St. Petersburg 1914 tournament rather poorly, nearly failing to qualify for the finals. Even in the finals he was still playing catch-up to José Capabl...
It has been said that the second World Champion, Emanuel Lasker, was unique among the top players of his time period in that he didn't create a chess school of thought. Others have said that he did create a school - the "psychological school." It ...
There often comes a time in a chess game when decisive action is needed. One must change the status quo or find a sudden solution to a long-standing problem. It is funny how this works out - chess is an equation, and decisive changes in the positi...
When I was new to chess, I had several fantasy scenarios of dramatic brilliancies in tournament games. Of course there was the standard "sacrifice everything for checkmate;" but also I had an unusual one - a long combination leading to all the pie...
In this article, the fourth part of my "A Pawn Up" series, we will be seeing a game that I played myself. This was the first round of the Eastern Open, which was held in Potomac, Maryland. This tournament always takes place in the time between Chr...
How does the young Anatoly Karpov win with an extra pawn? This will be the subject of today's article. In 1972 Karpov was twenty-one years old, and a new young talent. He was competing in the Soviet Team Championship, held in Moscow. His opponen...
Continuing our series on the technique of exploiting an extra pawn, we move along to a different kind of situation compared to our example from last week (Gligoric-Smyslov). In last week's example, we saw Smyslov, with an extra - although somewhat...
"And the rest is technique..." You've seen that annotation before. What does it mean? The rest is easy? Or we should pay less attention to the rest because it is less artistic? In fact, the technique of winning with an extra pawn is one of the m...
A distinctive structure arises from the French Defense, featuring White's space advantage and Black's restricted light-squared bishop. Against this, Black hopes for counterplay via the pawn break ...f6 and queenside counterplay on the c-file and o...
