Today we will study the King's Indian defense 7...Na6 variation by studying from none other than the newly crowned US Champion, Gata Kamsky's game. After nineteen long years of wait and and and interesting career map, Kamsky has regained the covet...
In the month of “Chithirai”, 27th day, 2010 (for information about the Tamil calendar you can see the following link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_calendar ) in Sofia, Bulgaria, Mother India danced with pride and in her forehead the rich and...
[ed: an English version of this article can be seen here: http://www.chess.com/article/view/viswanathan-anand] சித்திரை மாதம், இருபத்தி ஏழாம் நாள், இரண்டாயிரத்திப் பத்து: பல்கேரிய நாட்டின் தலை நகரமான சோபியாவில், நில மடந்தையின் சீராரும் வதனமான...
A world championship provides so much learning material for any chess fan. The opening novelties, the middle game struggle, the endgame technique and the psychological warfare and so on. One major aspect of these matches is that they rewrite the o...
The ash cloud drama that unfolded over World Champion Vishy Anand's journey to Sofia has only hyped up the enthusiasm of chess fans all over the world. Will this affect Anand negatively? or will he breeze through this just like the several other o...
We have seen what should be done in many of the openings that we discussed over the past several articles, hence today we decided to take a look at some of the big “NO NO” ideas in the Ruy Lopez 9.d4 variation. I (Magesh) am currently touring Aust...
More often than not in our lives, we ask this question to ourselves, “Was it worth it?” We are sure that this question haunts many of our readers too in their games as Chess is just a mini version of life. Personally on several occasions, I have f...
It is time to get back to the English opening today. We will study one of the games I played which started off as a Reti opening and later transposed into an English opening. Annotating one's own game definitely has some advantages to it, it helps...
The Maroczy Bind is an opening, or to be more precise a pawn formation, named after the Hungarian Grandmaster Geza Maroczy. It is characterized by white pawns at c4 and e4, and the exchange of white's d-pawn for black's c-pawn. White binds down Bl...
Petroff's Defense is one hard nut to crack when Black plays with a proper understanding. It guarantees solid play for Black without any longterm weaknesses and that is precisely the reason why we see so many Petroff games played at the top level. ...
Time and again our top players have broken the rules and strategies of chess that bind an ordinary eye. As we start believing a particular variation is out of fashion or a particular move is anti-positional, those lines get revived by some inspiri...
This week we shall study The Chebanenko Slav.This system is considered to be a super solid opening and the number of its followers seems to be growing fast.This system has become popular in the last few years thanks to the efforts of Grandmasters ...
The Petroff Defense. The name itself rings a “boring” bell to many people. Also called the Russian defense, the Petroff has a reputation of being a drawish opening. Considering the high percentage of draws turning out of this opening it is defini...
For anyone who follows professional chess at the top the level, it is obvious that the Alekhine defense is not a common choice at the Super GM level, and this is not without good reason. In many cases, White is able to get a reasonable space advan...
This week we shall study the Nimzo Indian Classical system. Usually this system is considered to lead to more of a positional game, but the British GM Nigel Short employed an interesting idea against the legendary Garry Kasparov in their World Cha...
This week we shall take a look at the Ruy Lopez Chigorin defense. Personally I (Magesh) have played this variation as both white and black for quite some time. Not that I can call myself an expert in it, but we felt I have had quite a few interest...
Most smart players have a knack for taking their opponents into uncomfortable areas very early in the game. Like we have discussed in previous articles, chess not only involves strategy over the board, but also before the actual game is started. S...
[Ed: This article was actually written by GM Serper] Pretty frequently my students complain about how difficult it is to learn new openings. Indeed, modern opening theory is more complicated than ever. You can spend weeks, even months of your...
Last week we discussed "Material for Initiative" in the French Tarrasch Variation with a pawn sacrifice on the 9th move. This week we shall see about the other various alternatives for Black. Our first game is between the 13th World Champion Garr...
One of the most difficult things in a game could be just being under enormous attack right from the opening. We will have to end up spending so much time and energy in defending accurately and by the time we reach a safe and comfortable position, ...
Today we have decided to take a different perspective on opening ideas. We are sure that most of our readers have encountered a situation where you get the black pieces against a slightly or even much weaker player than you and they end up playing...
Our topic this week has nothing to do with exchanges and slow maneuvering like the ones we saw last week. This week it is all about being imaginative and being able to handle haphazard positions. It is the Anti-Moscow variation. The positions aris...
People have plenty of choices in an opening. Some choose to play the dynamic and well analysed main variations, while some choose to play subtle yet promising side line and others choose to play some razor sharp surprise gambits like the ones we s...
Today we will take a look into another uncommon opening, The Icelandic Gambit. Even though this variation is not as sharp as the Kings Gambit opening that we studied a couple of weeks ago, this opening has its own sharp pit falls. Personally I (Ma...
