Women’s World Rapid
Winning Strategies for Club Players: Dear Chess Friends, I’m sure you know that to become a strong chess player, you should obtain several vital chess skills, such as calculation, tactical vision, visualization, positional understanding, opening knowledge, and others.
Imagine if there was a “magic” strategy that lets you win your games… The bad news is… there is no ONE strategy that could do all that (or at least I’m not aware of it).
The good news is, there is the next best thing.
Knowing what you have to do in a position is the key to getting an advantage and even winning your games. Different positions require different approaches. You can’t attack in every position, just as well as you shouldn’t play quietly all the time. It is important to recognize how a position should be played and this is something Grandmasters are very good at.
Why study William Steinitz? One of the most effective ways to study chess is to analyze games of the best players.
How do you choose a player to study from?
It can be based on what you want to improve in chess. Usually, people recommend learning how to attack from such players as Tal and Kasparov. For positional chess, Capablanca, Smyslov, Karpov, and Carlsen come to mind. These World Champions have played a lot of masterpieces and thus, provided us with much instructive material.
Find a Winning Plan: Every chess game is a collection of small plans that players come up with in order to advance their forces and outplay the opponent. Once the home preparation is over, the two players have to prove their understanding of the position on the board.
Positional Chess: To improve at chess and become a strong player, one needs to include all parts of the game in their training.
Tactics and strategy go hand in hand during a game and it is usually difficult to separate the two. One might be more present throughout a game than the other.
But, they are both needed in order to build up the game and finally win it.
Mikhail Botvinnik is one of the classics every player should study.
He was the 6th World Champion and held the title for almost 15 years, though not consecutive.
But he is also widely known as the Patriarch of the Soviet Chess School, as he trained many strong Grandmasters, with some of the most famous students being Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov and Vladimir Kramnik.
It is easy to start playing chess. There are not many rules to learn, and everything seems logical. A beginner can enjoy the game once they find out how the pieces move. It gets even more exciting when you start learning different tactics and strategies. That is when you start seeing the true beauty of the game. Players from all over the world try to improve at chess and understand it better. The game is so deep and complicated that even computers can’t play it perfectly. Still, with some effort, people get better at it and keep looking for further progress.
How to Win in Equal Positions: Winning a chess game is not an easy task. The days when you could win a game out of the opening are long gone. Everybody is very well prepared and the amount of information available on openings is overwhelming. Powerful computers deeply analyze most openings, which makes novelties much more difficult to find.
Portable Chess Game Notation (PGN): Have you ever heard of Steven James Edwards? His name is not so famous in the chess world, but his contribution is valuable. Thanks to him, we can appreciate the beauty of chess games and edit them with ease in different computer databases. He introduced to the community the Portable Game Notation (PGN) Standard in 1993. In this article, we will discuss why it was so important and how you could benefit from that invention.
