positional understanding

You have probably heard a lot about the importance of studying the classics and the many things you can learn from old games. Nowadays, when most of the players focus their training on openings and finding novelties that help them get an advantage from the first moves, this type of training is slightly overlooked.

However, even top Grandmasters constantly give credit to the classics, from whose games they have learned a lot and it has helped them improve their level. It is fascinating to hear them quoting old games or remembering the plans an ex-World Champion has used in the same type of position.

Chess clubs are often the first place to visit once a kid or even grown-up falls in love with the game of chess. One does not look immediately for advanced guidance, coach or start reading books; we look for the nearest chess club and check out their schedule and we go to that magic place as soon as we can. The beginnings are all about learning, meeting new people and engaging in chess activities such as lectures, tournaments and the most common one: casual blitz, endless sessions of the casual blitz.

One of the most difficult things for every chess player is to recognize the exact moment they have to stop for a moment and think deep to find the best move. No matter what your level is, this is it, this is the key factor to improve your play. In a training session with a coach, we always solve difficult exercises; this improves our vision, our tactical sense, calculation skills and to some degree our awareness to note when there are good moves to be found on the board. But what is the formula if there is one?

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.