Chess How-to’s

Prasanna Kumar
03.14.2024
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Prasanna Kumar
03.14.2024

A lot of people ask the same question over and over again, how to get better at chess? At the outset improving in chess is the same as improving any skill – Learn. Practice. Analyze. Repeat. But there is a vast difference between what beginners need to ‘learn’ compared to Expert players. So how to […]

WGM Raluca Sgircea, IM Renier Castellanos
08.19.2022

Attacking games are always exciting to watch and analyze. It is fascinating to watch top players and World Champions conduct mating attacks, finding brilliant ideas and making show-stopping moves and sacrifices. There are players who are innate attackers and for whom creating complications, playing for the initiative and finding creative ideas comes naturally.

Yury Markushin
06.15.2012
4
Yury Markushin
06.15.2012

I already have written a few articles about online chess. The one of them is called Online Chess vs. Over the Board Chess, which you may want to check out for comparing these two animals. The other one was a little bit more pessimistic (or realistic?): 11 Worst Habits of Chess Bullies. It talks about […]

Yury Markushin
07.29.2011
5
Yury Markushin
07.29.2011

A lot of players ask how to make good decisions at chess. It seems to be an easy question to answer but, actually it isn’t. What is very obvious for one player may be very subtle for the other one. One chess player asked me recently how do I look at the board and how […]

Yury Markushin
05.18.2011
2
Yury Markushin
05.18.2011

I have started posting 2 move tactical studies, solving those is a very effective way to improve tactical vision and the overall chess intuition. Today’s writing I’ve decided to devote to explaining the ways and methods of approaching these chess studies (aka tactics problems). Not only these methods can be applied for solving chess compositions […]

Yury Markushin
03.29.2011
1
Yury Markushin
03.29.2011

What are the problematic opponents? Problematic opponents are those opponents who are about your strength or weaker, but against which you’re unable to show good results. For example, we know that if a rating difference between you and your opponent is 0 points; you are expected to win about 50% of the games. Of course, […]

Yury Markushin
03.15.2011
0
Yury Markushin
03.15.2011

The previous two articles talk about how to play chess in won and in lost positions. The today’s reading is a logical continuation of the series. You must know how to play in a drawn position to be a well rounded chess player. You may ask “what’s so hard about playing in the drawn position […]

Yury Markushin
03.03.2011
0
Yury Markushin
03.03.2011

Last week I was writing about playing chess in the lost positions. This week’s topic maybe sounding more straightforward, since most players assume (quiet incorrectly) that once position is winning it will stay so forever. These naive players think if their position is winning they are going to win the game automatically. It’s a real […]

Yury Markushin
02.25.2011
2
Yury Markushin
02.25.2011

If you play chess regularly, there is a high possibility that you would have to play a game in the lost position. Does not matter how strong or weak chess player you are, you will have to defend the “weak” end of the board one day. There are plenty of information available (in various chess […]

Yury Markushin
02.17.2011
2
Yury Markushin
02.17.2011

As you can see from the title, today’s topic of our discussion is a bit unusual. First of all, what do I mean by coming back from a chess vacation? It means, you haven’t played chess for some significant amount of time but decided to change your life and come back. Sometimes people have to […]