Older players, KS3
Attacking the uncastled King Attacking the castled King Attacking with pieces Attacking with the help of pawns Opposite-side castling Using weaknesses: sacrifices and pawn levers Using weaknesses Making weaknesses Attack with a closed centre The Very Slow King’s-side Attack The King Hunt
A bit of a plug for Ray Cheng’s Practical Chess Exercises Puzzles in books, particularly tactics puzzle books, have a flaw: you know the answer is there somewhere. There are some ways to help you find the answer: i. look at every check, every capture, every threat ii. make a list of all the moves…
How do you defend against openings other than 1.e4? (The Queen’s Gambit and other openings) Against most of them you can play the same way. 1. Play in some order 1…d5 2…e6 and 3…Nf6 (1…Nf6 2…e6 and 3…d5 is usually OK or 1…e6 and 2…d5). 2. Develop your King’s Bishop and castle. Other Knight goes…
The Devon U14 Team does battle each year against other teams from the West of England and South Wales. I have been providing a bit of feedback on their games over the while, and the collected comments are below. They’re a sort of battle manual for junior chess, and I hope everyone will find something…
The point of analysing your game is to see where you need to improve for next time, not to see if the computer disagrees with you, or to produce a set of notes suitable for a magazine. N.B. You are allowed to disagree with the computer. Computers will tell you what the best move and…
Some ideas to get you started — other openings are available! Click […] to see list of games
Elegant and subtle, Capablanca was the perfect endgame machine. His opponents were often in losing positions before they realised it. In other games no-one could decide if he should have won or not… but he did! There is a fine book by Irving Chernev which collected and annotated Capablanca’s endgames: here are the games to…
First on the King’s-side: Then on the Queen’s-side: Marshall’s most famous game was this one, not a Queen’s Gambit: When the last move was played, spectators threw gold coins onto the board. Maybe they were settling bets, but I like to think they were appreciating the move!
The first Hastings tournament in 1895 was the strongest tournament up to that time. Every top player was invited and they all turned up: World Champion Lasker, ex-champion Steinitz, Steinitz’ challengers Chigorin and Gunsberg, Lasker’s future challengers Schlechter and Janowsky, the old British Champions Bird, Blackburne and Burn, and the new US Champion, Pillsbury, whom…
