Today I’m going to finish my series of posts on one of the classic rook-and-pawn endgames: the endgame with balanced pawns on the kingside, and with one player enjoying an outside passed pawn on the queenside. The prototypical position is number 367 in Reuben Fine’s Basic Chess Endings, which is why I’ve been calling it the “Fine endgame.” The Fine Endgame. With White to move, it’s a draw. In Part 2 we went over this position with a Fine-tooth comb (ha, ha) and found that there are more possibilities in the position than he let on. His summary judgment that all such endgames are drawn appears ..read more

I hope you’re ready for some very, very challenging endgame analysis! Today we’ll have what I think is the most difficult and interesting of my four posts on what I call the “Fine endgame”: rook plus 4 pawns versus rook plus 3 pawns, with the stronger side enjoying an outside passed pawn (usually on the a-file) and with the weaker side enjoying the optimal rook position, behind the a-pawn. In Part 2 I discussed the position below, which is position 367 in Reuben Fine’s Basic Chess Endings. We saw that it is drawn with best play for both sides, but the issue is considerably more complicated th ..read more

Last time I introduced a new series of four posts about a very basic (but very difficult) rook and pawn endgame. It’s the endgame where one side (we’ll say White) is a pawn up, and that pawn is an outside passed pawn (we’ll say an a-pawn). As per the “Tarrasch Rule,” the best defensive position for Black’s rook is behind the passed pawn. If Black can’t get there, then it’s a pretty easy win for White. Conventional wisdom says that the game should be a draw if Black does succeed in getting his rook behind the pawn. But computers have made this evaluation a little bit shakier, as we’ll see in t ..read more

For the last month, since I got back from my disastrous tournament in Minneapolis, I haven’t shown any games from it because I thought they would be too embarrassing. But in order to learn from a failure, you have to face it and ask what happened and why. So now I’m going to start analyzing my games. Heck, maybe I’ll even show you all of them! The first one I’ll show you is really, really embarrassing. I played like a class-C player in this game, no better. I failed in every phase of the game. I failed the opening, which I didn’t know and didn’t have a plan for. I failed at positional play, c ..read more

The latest news that has blown up the chess Internet came in two waves last week. First, at the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, world champion Magnus Carlsen lost a game to a young but rapidly improving American grandmaster, Hans Niemann. Hans grew up in the San Francisco area, so people around here were full of pride — local boy makes good and all of that. Like the rest of the chess world, we were blindsided by the next act in the saga. Carlsen dropped out of the tournament, hinting but not actually saying that he suspected Niemann of cheating. I would write more about the scandal, but I think ..read more

My diary, 9/1/1972 Sadly, I was rooting for the wrong guy. This month’s Chess Life has an interesting 50-year retrospective on the Fischer-Spassky match. I thought that the most insightful article was a short interview with IM Anthony Saidy, who hosted Fischer at his house before Fischer left for Iceland. Here is one thing I did not know. Chess Life asked, “To what extend [sic] do you think he was aware of how his demands affected Spassky psychologically?” Saidy: “He did develop a bit of empathy, which made him write Spassky an abject apology.” I would love to see that letter! Also, Chess Life ..read more

To take my mind off my recent “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” chess tournament, here are some thoughts on other things going on in the chess world… My friend Gjon Feinstein has alerted me several times to a YouTube channel called “Chess Dojo” (https://www.youtube.com/c/ChessDojo), a project of GM Jesse Kraai, IM David Pruess, and IM Kostya Kavutskiy. As many of you know, Jesse Kraai used to record lectures at chesslecture.com, and in fact he is the person who invited me to lecture for that website. I always considered Jesse to be a genius in the art form of the 15-to-30 minute chess v ..read more

If you look through the July 2022 issue of Chess Life, you might find a familiar name on the last page. Mike Splane, whom I have mentioned many times on this blog, is featured in the column “My Best Move,” which ends every issue. The game that he writes about also appeared on this blog, in one of my all-time most popular posts, called How to Break Fort Knox in 13 Moves. Some of you might be wondering, “But wait a minute? Didn’t Mike die last year?” Yes, he did. But in the last six months before he died, he worked tirelessly on his chess memoir, called Chess Wizardry, Thinking Outside the Box ..read more

Last month I received a surprise e-mail from Mackenzie Molner, a grandmaster who is launching a “chess academy” at grandmastermac.com. He asked if I would be interested in having him write a guest post for my blog, as a way of cross-promoting both my blog and his website. I had never spoken with Mac before, but of course I knew his name. It’s not the sort of name I would forget, because it’s the same as mine! I told him that I’ve never had a guest post on my blog, because I have always wanted it to have my “brand,” but on the other hand I was very interested in the whole cross-promotion idea ..read more

You know something really unusual has happened when one of your Facebook friends who is not a chess player posts something about chess on your wall. “Have you heard about this?” she asked. “The New York Times has a new chess column.” I did know about it, but just barely! Only one day before, one of my Facebook friends who does play chess had posted that Daniel Naroditsky is the new New York Times chess columnist. It’s wonderful news in many ways. First, Danya (the Russian nickname he usually goes by) is a friend of mine, both on Facebook and in real life. Also, he’s a product of the San Franc ..read more