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Everyone knows how important it is to be good at tactical play. It helps to find beautiful combinations and avoiding blunders. Apart from that, excelling at tactics often helps compensate for other chess weaknesses.

When you have a bad position, you can exploit the opponent’s tactical inaccuracies to eventually come up on top. Contrariwise, if you have a winning position you need to be careful not to miss any tactical ideas (for both sides!) to finish the game positively. But how do you get better at it?

The Queen’s Gambit Declined is one of the most classical and solid chess openings. It starts with the moves 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 when Black strengthens the center with a pawn and prepares the development of the kingside. Later, Black can opt for different schemes of development but all of them promise stability and safety. This opening is a frequent guest in a tournament practice at any level and should be studied by everyone.

Mikhail Tal’s style of playing was maniacal, but there was a method to the madness. Many of his tactical combinations were unsound, but they worked in his hands!

The psychological pressure that he created on his opponents, his brilliant feel for the initiative, and his ability to maintain the momentum, threats after threats, with insane sacrifices and crazy king hunts…

The Nimzowitsch Defense packs a punch of surprise right in the opening but has also got a misplaced knight on c6 in most cases.

If you play Black ever in your chess games and your opening needs to have a shock value, this is for you.

Owen’s Defense starts with the moves 1.e4 b6 or 1.e4 e6 2.d4 b6 when Black is going to fianchetto the light-squared bishop. This is a bit slow and allows White to occupy the center but Black is hoping to attack it later with pieces and pawns. This system is not going to equalize any quickly, but people usually don’t play it to make a draw. This is the way to unbalance the game and outplay the opponent in the less-known positions.

The Fried Liver Attack is one of the oldest and at the same time most popular opening lines at the beginner level. You can see it played even by grandmasters sometimes but usually experienced players tend to avoid it as Black. Of course, it is not only because the Fried Liver Attack sounds scary (friendly internet users assure us it comes from an Italian saying “dead as a piece of liver”) but the attack is very dangerous for Black objectively.

The Grunfeld Defense is one of the most dynamic and sound chess openings. It starts after the moves 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5, when Black opens files and diagonals for their pieces to target White’s center. This unusual system of development started gaining popularity in the 1920-s, after Ernest Grunfeld successfully employed it at the highest level, beating Alexander Alekhine. Later, Alekhine even used it himself. Nowadays almost every top grandmaster has the Grunfeld Defense in their repertoire.

After the longest half-time break ever, the Candidates Tournament in Yekaterinburg resumed. Ian Nepomniachtchi won the tournament with8.5 points and a round to spare and thus gained the right to challenge Magnus Carlsen for the World Championship title. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave is second with 8 points. Anish Giri and Fabiano Caruana have shared third place with 7,5 points.

Kasparov wasn’t called the ‘Beast from Baku’ for nothing. He was indeed a “beast”!

His style of playing was more like a herd of full-grown African buffaloes and zebras charging toward you… as Thanos said, dread it, run from and it still arrives.

His style of chess was extremely powerful, and his opponents cowered even they pushed the first move on the board. They were lost even before the game started.

One of the first things you learn when starting out is how to read each square. Each of the 64 squares has a unique name and you will hear strong players and Grandmasters naming them constantly when they analyze. It might be confusing at first and it might take a while before you can quickly identify a square, but you will get there, with a little patience. Chess notation is the language of chess and you will eventually need to learn it, if you want to continue down this road and make your journey easier.