I recently (April 27-29, 2012) played in the Maryland Open chess tournament in the Under 2000 section. I played well and won the section with a 5-0 score. This earned me the title of 2012 Maryland Amateur Champion, the 4th time I have won the titl...
One concept that new players sometimes find difficult to grasp is weak squares. “I understand how a piece can be weak, but a weak square? What does that mean?” A square is weak when it is controlled by your opponent and you have little or no c...
We all have our favorite openings. Ones that we have studied thoroughly and have played dozens of times. Whenever one of our games begins with that opening, it evokes warm memories of brilliant wins from the past and naturally gives us a feeling...
In this game, White plays the initial phase of the opening well enough, but then he starts to drift with some questionable and unnecessary moves, which allow Black to work up a strong queenside initiative. At that point, White: recognizes the pro...
In this game, the players castle on opposite sides, which usually signals attacks on both sides. Both players pursue their chances on each side, but Black misses something that costs him the exchange. But he stays calm and uses the time White sp...
This article is the first in a series that will illustrate what a player needs to do and how he needs to think when facing a losing position or one that appears to be going from bad to worse. The first step is to realise that we all throw in a fe...
The weak dark square complex is a group of squares that are undefended by nearby pawns on white squares. For examples in this article, Black has pawns on f7, g6, and h7, and the squares f6, g7,and h6 are undefended by Black pawns. They form a we...
If any of us were asked "What makes some chess players better than others?", we might come up with a number of different responses. Some replies might be: They are better at seeing tactics, They have a better memory for openings, They can calculat...
It's nice to win games by playing amazing moves, surprising tactics, and slashing attacks, but we all know that those are rare and that we can't expect a steady diet of brilliant wins. It's like the lottery. It would be nice to win once in a whi...
In the following game, played in a simultaneous exhibition against a well-known senior master from Maryland, White plays a variation of the Bayonet Attack vs. the King's Indian Defense, throwing in 9. Nd2 before 10. b4. A war is waged over contro...
As I noted in the previous article, "No Fire From This Dragon", English GM Jonathan Mestel recalls receiving a telegram from the British Chess Federation at the World Student Chess Olympiad in Mexico City in August of 1977 that read "Miles says b...
The Dragon Variation of the Sicilian Defense has always been considered an enterprising, adventurous opening for Black. The Yugoslav Attack vs. the Dragon has always been considered the "acid test" of the variation and is one of the most heavily ...
One of the goals we aspire to in each game is to make every move count. That is, we want to make moves that threaten something or at least contribute to some objective. We try to avoid pointless moves that put our opponents under no pressure. ...
As you might gather from the title of this article, some players do not seem to be aware that the loss of a single pawn in the opening, without obtaining any visible compensation for it, is enough to lose a chess game. This probably stems from th...
While I'm all in favor of playing aggressively, I try to do by playing an aggressive opening as White. And when I'm playing Black, I try to play aggressively after I have equalized and gotten a few pieces developed. However, choosing an opening ...
In part 1 of this article (http://www.chess.com/article/view/opposite-side-castling-the-basics), I showed a game where the kingside attack was conducted using pieces to open up the pawn cover on Black's kingside. In part 2, I show a game with the...
When you have to drive somewhere you have never been before, there are two types of people. One type gets a map and plots a route to the destination, prints out driving directions from the computer, or uses a GPS navigator. The other type relies...
In games where the players castle on opposite sides, an attack against the opposing king is almost always in order. The rational for this is "If you don't do it to him, he's going to do it to you" or, if you like, the more pithy "Kill or be kille...
Just as circumstances in one part of the world can affect events in far-flung places, moves on one side of the chessboard can have a dramatic effect on the other side of the board. In this game, White creates some threats on the queenside, but Bl...
In this article, I am going to try something new, and I would like the readers at chess.com to let me know if they like it. I wrote an article a while back called "Learning By Induction"( http://www.chess.com/article/view/learning-by-induction ). ...
The title of this article refers to the computer program BELLE, which was the first one to reach master strength (unlike now when they are all grandmaster strength or better), Boris Baczynskyj, a master who annotated one of BELLE's games, and Arth...
We have all had games where we knew we were winning, but we couldn't seem to finish it off with a win. You play well enough to get to a position where you both know you are winning, but then he seems to play better or you play worse. You have p...
I wrote an article called "Learning By Induction", the main point of which was that a player could learn chess better by playing through the games of strong players and extracting for himself the lessons contained within them (inductive reasoning)...
The following game was played in Hagerstown (Maryland) City Park, once voted the "second most beautiful city park in America" (I presume Central Park in NYC is first). I was visiting relatives there, and we decided to go for a walk in the park. ...
Sometimes you start a game and wait for your opponent to castle so you know on which side to begin mounting your attack. But what if he won't castle? What if he stays in the center and the center is closed? What do you do then? Sometimes a wel...
