Playing Against The Caro-Kann Defense
Reference: Chess Openings for White, Explained: Winning with 1.e4, Second Revised and Updated Edition Fischer vs. Petrosian 1970 Beograd World-SU 1970 · Caro-Kann Defense: Exchange. Rubinstein Variation (B13)
From Disappointment Comes Change
I haven’t posted for several months, because I have not been happy with my chess improvement. I have taken these past few months to review my training program and to try to figure out the missing piece of my chess improvement puzzle. I am not any closer to coming up with an answer than I…
Threats in Chess Pt. 2
I wasn’t planning on making this a series of posts on threats, but I feel I’m on to something. My chess has improved since I have restructured my thought process to incorporate threat analysis . Threat Based Evaluation Process 1. What are my opponent’s threats? a. Is there a mate threat? b. Is…
Threats in Chess
I have been away for a few months, in which time I have been through a long plateau and a bout of chess related self-doubt. The reason for the self-doubt is that I feel that I should be at a different playing level than that which I am (1300 USCF), and I am a bit…
Psychology of Chess Weaknesses
The path to chess improvement lies in finding your weakest area of knowledge and placing all of your effort into converting it into a strength. My greatest weakness is an apprehension, bordering on fear, of delving into deep calculations and analysis. This analytical deficiency affects both my combinational and analysis in over the board play…
Yet Another Training Plateau
I haven’t written a new blog post in quite a while, and I wanted to give an update on what I have been up to in the past few months. I have started writing about my specific training on my Chess Notebook blog and that has taken some of the time I dedicate to writing for…
The Philidor Position
The Lucena and Philidor positions are the most important positions to know when it comes to rook and pawn endings. Here we will be looking at the Philidor position, which allows Black to draw against an opponent that is up a pawn. It’s important to note that the Philidor position only works if the opponent’s pawn…
New York 1924
New York 1924 has gone down in history as one of the most important chess tournaments of all time. Three undisputed world champions including Capablanca and Emanuel Lasker, and a briliantly annotated by future world champoin Alexander Alekhine. I have made the PGN of all of the games available here.
Think Like a Chess Engine
In Kotov’s great book “Think Like a Grandmaster” he taught the average chess player the inner workings of how a chess master thinks about a position by creating a tree of candidates and then proceeding along the tree. While there is much to learn from Kotov’s work, I have always been facinated how computers can…
Logical Chess Move by Move (PGN Download)
I just posted a PGN file with all 33 games of Irving Chernev’s Logical Chess Move by Move. You can access the downloads section here. The games are unannotated and are for following along with the book.