kramnik - tag

The question that gives the title to this article is one of those to which every chess player has his own opinion and answer. It is an extremely complicated matter. Sometimes we are in a tournament situation where the full point is the only acceptable result. The most common reasons are the chase for a […]

7.Nd5 Against Sveshnikov Sicilian: For the first time since 2012, when Boris Gelfand used it as his mainstay weapon with Black after 1 e4 against Viswanathan Anand in their World Championship Match, the Sveshnikov Sicilian returned to the biggest scene in this year’s World Championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana. In a curious […]

One of the things every chess player has to do in order to improve at chess is seen many games played by strong Grandmasters. This is a great method of enriching your knowledge and getting to understand a wide variety of positions – not only in the middlegame but also opening plans and endgame. However, […]

Chess Improvement: Going serious at chess all by oneself is something truly admirable. It is unnecessary to say that chess is one of the most difficult things to master and every day it continues to become more difficult as the level of the players keeps rising. How to become better at chess? That is a […]

Game four of the World Chess Championship match in London was drawn after only 34 moves. Magnus Carlsen was angry with allowing his challenger Fabiano Caruana such an easy draw with black. Carlsen switched to the English with white but seemed to be thinking even in a position that Caruana had previously had over the […]

Game 3 of the match ends in a draw, with Caruana getting a promising position out of the opening but then ending up worse by the end! The opening was looking a bit boring even after Carlsen surprised everybody with Qc7. Looks like the strategy of Caruana is just to have a solid position with […]

Minor piece endgame, and a quite common one, was analyzed by me and my student a few days ago. One side has the bishop pair and 6 pawns (3 on each flank). And, the opponent has a knight and a bishop. Also, the 6 pawns are divided into 2 on the queenside and 4 on […]

The Candidates Tournament played in Berlin to decide the next world title challenger is over and it will be remembered as one of the most spectacular tournaments in the history of chess. With plenty of fighting chess, us, the fans, got a daily share of entertainment that is hard to compare to anything we can […]

Nowadays there are many chess players who focus a lot on theory and trying to get an advantage, even the slightest one, in the resulting middlegame. With the advance of technology and all the strong engines available, the search for novelties is constant. Many players invest a lot of time in learning long complicated lines […]

Vladimir Kramnik is one of the greatest chess players of our time. His positional playing style and fabulous endgame technique are quite unique and his games make great studying material for those who want to improve these aspects of the game. Kramnik’s contribution to the opening theory should not go unnoticed either; if the Berlin […]