Here is another cool article written by the WGM Natalia Pogonina, where she continues the nemeses and customers theory and talks about three basic chess characters as Positional, Tactical and.. Calculator. Natalia also analyzes her game against 2448 FIDE rated WFM (!?).

One of the reasons behind the “nemeses and customers” theory is that each chess player has his own style. It reminds me of the “Rock, Paper, Scissors” game where there is no one dominant item.

This article is a continuation of Rapid Chess Improvement: Evaluation of Positions, which covered the main things a chess player needs to work on in order to improve the game.

Opening repertoire is a very tricky thing to work on. You do not want to spend too much time studying opening lines which you may never play in actual game. At the same time you do need to know main lines because someone may decide to play them against you.

Today I will discuss the Knight + Bishop endgame checkmate.  This endgame was well analyzed by Philidor long time ago, in 1749. It is not the most common mate you will see, it occurs once at every 5000 games, but it is definitely important to know how to use the Knight and a Bishop together.

I have seen many guides that are trying to explain how to actually checkmate a lone King with Knight and Bishop, but they’re very often failing to teach. They show moves, give some explanation and it even seems like you understand how to do it yourself at first, but… when trying to do it, it just doesn’t work.

The problem is that there is no exact guide for this mate available; at least I wasn’t able to find it.  This is a main reason why I’m writing and you’re (hopefully) reading this. I will systematically present the well known information and form an algorithm, how to do it.