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…
Chess has got better over the years and the top players today play a very subtle game, which is not easy to explain. So what can we learn from the best player, Magnus Carlsen? The eternal advice to ‘look at every check and every capture, every move’ applies to super-Grandmasters as much as the rest…
Anand has a lovely fluent style of play, and is a really nice chap as well! Here is his most famous game: a very sharp modern opening followed by an amazing sacrificial attack.
All the World Chess Champions are men, so here’s one from the other half of humanity, and a fine Appendix to the list of guys that ever joined the ‘Vera Menchik Club’. Judit Polgar was strongest woman chess player ever. She never became World Champion, and was never interested in becoming World Women’s World Chess…
Kramnik has an unusual skill — playing apparently simple and effective plans against the most complex modern openings, and against the most dangerous opponents. Here he his showing the value of a central pawn majority against the Grunfeld’s staunchest defender: This was his dramatic last-round win to save his world champion title in 2004. Get…
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
Kasparov wasn’t just the best chessplayer of his time, he may have been the best of any time. Botvinnik used to say that he was [i]primus inter pares[/i], first among equals, but Kasparov wasn’t like that at all. His rating was a long way ahead of his rivals. And he didn’t like to win a…
Fischer never defended his title, which passed to the winner of the Candidates’ matches, Anatoly Karpov, in 1975. Karpov was a worthy Champion, though, and his quiet, deft chess dominated the world of chess for a decade. Here are two games where he strangled strong opponents. Click […] to see list of games
‘Bobby’ Fischer was known as a threat to the Soviet domination of world chess for many years, but kept withdrawing from qualifying as the challenger over disputes with organizers. He finally qualified in 1971, having stormed past the other Candidates with huge scores, and beat Spassky in a match which was as dramatic off the…
