In this week's edition of my "Without the Lady" column, I will be showing an interesting game I played last year against the young Filipino GM Wesley So. Despite the early exchange of queens, the game was razor-sharp - imbalanced in terms of struc...
In the first part of this short series we saw some examples of the advantage that extra space confers on its owner. Now we will see the dark side of the space advantage - the weaknesses left behind as your forces advance further across the board. ...
There is a well-known advice that when you have less space you should trade pieces. In many positions this is true, but quite often trades simply remove your source of counterplay and allow the opponent to consolidate his space advantage. In queen...
One of the things I mentioned when I introduced my new column last week was the paradox of the column itself. It deals specifically with positions without the queen, but is not necessarily about endgames. There tends to be differing methods of pla...
I am starting a new column now, as I promised before. The subject of the column will be positions in which the queens have been traded. I don't say "endgames", because I don't think all positions without queens can be called as such - there are "q...
We have come to the last part of my series on the positional exchange sacrifice (see also part 1 and part 2). By no means have we covered all possible reasons to sacrifice the exchange - were I to try to do that, the series would go on for many ar...
Today we continue our series on positional exchange sacrifices. Last week we saw some examples of exchange sacrifices to create a general situation which benefits the minor pieces. This week we will be focusing on examples of exchange sacrifices w...
I am going to begin a series on the positional exchange sacrifice, consisting of several articles. There are of course many different possible justifications for an exchange sacrifice, and I cannot cover all of them. But we will be focusing on a f...
This week's review of The March of Chess Ideas by IM Anthony Saidy might be my last "My Bookshelf" article. I say "might" because you never know, I could change my mind. First of all, although I have heard that some people like the book reviews, I...
If you have any knowledge of chess history, you have probably heard of the theoretical dispute - and antagonism - between Siegbert Tarrasch and Aron Nimzowitsch, the leaders of the classical and hypermodern schools (respectively). It appears that ...
Last week I showed a couple of examples of a king hunt. This week we will see another example of a deposed king being chased across the board. First it somewhat willingly steps into the center, with the leader of the white pieces hoping that his o...
For the next two weeks, I will again return to the theme of Attack and Defense - more specifically, the phenomenon known as the "king hunt." Although nowadays many of us are eating food which is farmed - such as farmed fish, chickens i...
My first review in the "My Bookshelf" column was "Dynamic Chess Strategy" by Mihai Suba. The title of the book I am reviewing this week is almost identical. Yet the books are completely different. Both books are modern middlegame books, and both f...
This week I will be reviewing a unique book - 200 Open Games, by the former "Vice-World Champion", David Bronstein. Rather than fully annotated games, this book presents 200 short vignettes, each followed by an un-annotated game, with one diagram....
This week I will be covering a very interesting old book called 100 Soviet Chess Miniatures. The games were selected and annotated by P.H. Clarke. This book is particularly unique because the games are entirely by unknown players, and the games ar...
Few games test a player psychologically as much as the last-round game of a tournament (or the decisive game of a match). When the prize money, championship, or norm is on the line, the tension becomes extremely high. In this situation you can fin...
When I introduced this column I mentioned that I probably wouldn't be covering many opening books. However, I decided to write a review of this fairly old book on the French by grandmaster Lev Psakhis from the "Complete..." series. Why? Well, fi...
Last August I wrote an article called "The Knight's Moves", about superhuman (or rather, "superequine") knights which travel the board with amazing activity. But more often a powerful knight takes the form of a "permanent knight" - a knight entren...
This week I will be analyzing the well-known book by Alexander Kotov, Think Like a Grandmaster. This was the first part of a three-part series - the other two books being Play Like a Grandmaster and Train Like a Grandmaster. Kotov - and this boo...
Recently while teaching chess, the following position occurred in a tournament game that a student was showing me. The student was Black and his opponent had just played 1.Nd5. He said "I think if I traded knights I would actually be losing." ...
I will be reviewing one of the most influential books I had early on in my chess development. This is an excellent book by grandmaster John Nunn and Peter Griffiths. Secrets of Grandmaster Play is at once a best games collection (all of the game...
Recently, a friend sent me a fantastically crazy game, and I have decided to share it in my column. It was a fairly obscure game, from the Beverwijk tournament of 1961. The position that arose was so incredibly lopsided that it is hard to believe....
This week I will be reviewing a book that was pretty influential for me when I was growing up. This is Garry Kasparov's game collection The Test of Time. The book includes his annotations of games starting from his first steps in international che...
This week I will be reviewing an interesting and unusual book about the development of chess in China. The author, Liu Wenzhe, is considered to be one of the first promoters of western chess in China. Originally a XiangQi (Chinese chess) player, W...
