Mikhail Botvinnik

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 remember.

The tournament was interesting overall and every player showed great fighting spirit and determination. We found 4 points, in particular, to be quite interesting and they can serve us not only as experience lessons but also as inspiration.

The results of a competitive chess player are not only influenced by the amount of time he invests in training.

There are also many other factors which play a major role in tournaments, such as psychology, stamina or approach to the game.

In this article, we will give you some practical advice to help you get in your best shape for the competition and have a good performance.

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 and tend to give less importance or simply not pay as much attention to the other parts of the game. However, we are strong believers that studying middlegame and endgames is what helps you become a better player. Also, we are advocates of including the study of classics in your training schedule.

Fischer Random chess, also known as 960 chess, is a variant of chess invented by the former World Champion Bobby Fischer and has lately seen a high increase in popularity, amongst both amateurs and top Grandmasters. The rules are the same as for classical chess, the only difference being the starting position. The pawns remain on their squares, but the rest of the pieces are scrambled. The result is 960 possible starting positions, hence its alternative name. Another important difference from the classical chess is the time control – all the championships that have been organized so far have been played at rapid time control.

We believe that knowing the classics is one of the first steps to improve in chess. This is why we have started this series of articles where we try to bring you closer some of the great classics of our times and show some of their games to serve you as a starting point for your own further study. So far we have talked mostly about ex-World Champions, names that every chess player knows. In this article, we are going to present you a very strong player, but considerably less-known, especially by the younger generations. He never got to be a World Champion, but he was one of the best players of his time and scored many wins against his famous colleagues.

Continuing our series of classics you must study if you want to become a complete chess player, we are going to talk today about one player who built the foundation of the strategic concepts and principles as we know them today, Wilhelm Steinitz.

He was born in 1836 in Prague (back then part of the Austrian Empire) and started learning chess at the age of 12. He improved rapidly and started to be regarded as the best player of those times in 1866, after beating the current strongest player, Adolf Anderssen, in a 14 games match.

From time to time our opponents offer a draw and so do we.

Let’s try to figure out how to make the right decision about the “draw offer”. Different aspects should be considered here.

The strategy is a very important part of the chess game and, many times, slightly disregarded by club players, who usually like to attack and try to do it at any (positional) cost. If you are such a player and are thinking about giving strategy more thought, then the player we are going to present in this article could be the perfect start. He is known for his “correct” play, which has at times gotten him to be regarded as “dull”. He was also a master of defense and rarely attacked, but when he did so, it was in positions he felt he had full control.

His style of play led to many draws, but he remains one of the greatest players in the history of chess and one classic you must definitely study – it will help you improve your play a lot.

Since the very moment we start interacting with chess, we have been taught that we must play active and seek any chance our opponent gives us in order to do so. We are told to improve our pieces and put as much pressure on our opponent as possible. We are also taught to try to win as much time as possible by developing our pieces with tempo and force our opponent to interrupt his plans by having to defend instead of getting active. This is known as seeking the initiative, something we should be considering at all times.

We always tell you how important it is to study not only opening and only solve tactics, but also give a study the classics. If you don’t know where to start, in this article we are going to present you another heavy name in the history of chess – Vassily Vasilyevich Smyslov. We have selected three of his many games that show only a few things that you can learn from this great player.

Smyslov first became interested in chess when he was six. His father, who himself had played and studied chess with Mikhail Cigorin for a short time, was the boy’s first teacher.