Latest Posts - Page 122

  Returning to the St. Louis Chess Club in the chess capital of the U.S. for round 5 of the U.S. Championships and U.S. Women’s Championships we see GM Var Akobian make a move at the leaders with a win as black over Timur Gareev.

Akobian out played his opponent in a challenging end game. Alejandro Ramirez defeated Mac Molner to stay competitive in the tournament.

Have you ever wondered what can be the perfect gift for a chess player? Should you get a chess book or the classical chess pieces set? No, that’s too straightforward and everyone can do that. Want to get something more clever and stylish?

   The US Men’s and Women’s Championships kicked off on Thursday May 8th. The tournament is always interesting and full of surprises. The defending champions are GM Gata Kamsky FIDE 2778 on the Men’s side and GM Irina Krush on the women’s side. Timur Garrev FIDE 2751 is expected to be a major challenger on the men’s side as he was last year when he came into the tournament after an exciting 33 person blindfold simul right before the event winning 29 and drawing 4

We present 3 the most tricky mate-in-1 problems you will ever see. To solve these tactical wonders you don’t need to be a very strong chess player.

All you need to know is the basic chess rules and possess some imagination and intuition.

This report should begin with an apology to our readers. When this tournament commenced, I had planned to give a day-by-day report of the whole event. But as the saying goes, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray. So a blow-by-blow account is missed. Instead you have the whole story in one piece.

In our recent update on What’s New in Theory we set a little challenge for our readers.

It appears that quite a few missed it. So here is one more chance. In the following position Black overlooked an elegant tactical trick.

Can you spot the same?

Black to play

This was a blitz game. So you are allowed only 5 seconds to solve.

Or else you overstep the time limit.

Analysis of a position is a very important skill to master for a chess player of any level. Many chess players analyze positions almost spontaneously, without a well-defined plan.

They do not have a scheme in their mind that can guide the thinking process.

The outcome is incomplete analyzes and plenty of missed possibilities. This article is about to change that. We offer an easy to follow position analysis cheat sheet to use in all games.

Everyone has fears. Some of the most common ones are the fear of spiders, snakes and heights.

What about the chess players? Are they afraid of something that most other people just aren’t?

Here is the list of the biggest chess players’ fears:

There are not that many players out there who enjoy chess training process more than actually playing and winning the games itself. The last thing you want to do is to spend your valuable time training in the ways that do nothing good for your chess. While no chess training technique is totally useless, some are not effective enough to invest your time on. Let’s find out which ones!

In this update on ChessPublishing.com our columnist draws attention to some rare lines among other things -Ed.