Hello everyone and welcome. For the previous five months, activity has been restricted to online rapid play and correspondence, and since rapid play usually has little to show for it, and correspondence games, and at that, decisive correspondence games, take for ever to occur, we haven't seen a lot of usable material for articles this year. That said, we now at least have the "Prohibition" series at the Charlotte Chess Center, playing one game a week on Tuesday nights. It's not much, but it's something, and hopefully will allow for somewhat more frequent publication here. This week, we are g ..read more

Hello everyone and welcome. As chess continues to be unavailable over the board, I am continuing to cover decisive games and exciting draws in the world of correspondence chess. The feature game today comes from the IV Argentine Cup, a large, 35 bracket tournament with 7 players per bracket and multi-entry. The cost to get in was 10 Euro, but there was a 6-for-5 deal, and so I am one that decided to take up on that offer, and have 36 games going across 6 brackets in that tournament. The top finisher in each bracket moves on to the semi-finals, and then there will likely be a few second places ..read more

State of the Charlotte Chess Center Written by Founding Director, FM Peter Giannatos Dear CCCSA Members and Center Supporters: I miss you! It feels like it's been so long since we've seen one another. I am fortunate to have kept up with many of you virtually through email and streams. I wanted to draft a note about the current state of the CCCSA, what we have done, and where we are going. I hope you find this post helpful and informative. Peter Giannatos Founder and Director peter.giannatos@charlottechesscenter.org Synopsis of Events Since March Free Weekly Chess.com Tournaments Nea ..read more

Hello everyone and welcome to the thirty-eighth edition of The French Connection. In this one, we are going to be looking at an interesting early check for Black in the Tarrasch Variation and be looking at another game from the Lockdown Cup. With the feature game, we will be looking at what is one of only two lines that White can play that pose any question at all to Black's idea, and so we will be looking at that line along with why other lines just don't do the job, and maybe we'll take a look at the other main line in another article when we see it featured in an actual game. Without furth ..read more

A Tale of Two Weird Winawers Hello everyone and welcome to the 37th edition of The French Connection. As we continue to be stuck at home during this pandemic, correspondence chess and online blitz have taken over, and since the quality of online blitz chess is usually not good, I am continuing to cover correspondence games as they come to a close, and this week, I've had two games come to a close this week, and we will be covering both. Normally, in this series, we cover one game per article, but this time, like The French Connection: Volume 9, we will actually cover two games that fall in th ..read more

Hello everyone and welcome. As we continue to deal with COVID-19 and the lack of over the board tournaments, I am continuing to analyze games as they finish in correspondence tournaments. In the last article, we looked at a game from a Zonal tournament. This time, we are going to look at a game from the "Lockdown Cup 2020" tournament. It is a small tournament of strictly players from the United States. There are 50 entries all told with many players having two entries. It is broken down into 10 prelim brackets with 5 players each, the winner of which will advance along with the highest rated 2 ..read more

Hello everyone and welcome to the thirty-sixth edition of The French Connection. The featured game in this article comes from the World Zone Individual Championship Preliminaries. Sounds like an ear full, doesn't it? It is a correspondence event played on the biggest world wide correspondence site, the "ICCF", or "International Correspondence Chess Federation". There are four stages, and the stages are staggered. Not everybody starts at the same stage. You have the Preliminaries, Semi-Finals, Candidates, and Finals. Where you start depends on your rating. Those over 2400 start at the Candidate ..read more

Hello everyone and welcome to the thirty-fifth edition of The French Connection. This time, we are going to cover a game from this week's Friday night rapid event that the Charlotte Chess Center has been running since shutting down temporarily due to COVID-19. This was the final round, and we will be seeing another Advance French, but this time, Black goes with the 6...c4 line (most of what we've covered lately has been 6...Nh6). This tends to be the more positional approach, but after some questionable development by Black, White goes for an attack in the center. We will see the importanc ..read more

Hello everyone and welcome. While the whole country is virtually on lock down during this pandemic, there clearly won't be a whole lot of competition going on in the next couple of months. I will continue to publish articles periodically (though I may skip a week here or there if nothing good comes up), but most of it is going to be either games from the past, or else blitz or rapid games. While blitz and rapid tend to be of lower quality than classical chess, every now and then one comes up worth covering, and that's what we have today. Black takes a hot pawn early on that is not "refuted ..read more

Hello everyone and welcome to the thirty-fourth edition of The French Connection. In the previous edition, we saw a game played by Wolfgang Uhlmann from the Black side of the King's Indian Attack where because of a very aggressive move by White, Black had to play a strong defensive move where if he didn't actually understand the position, and simply played routine moves without paying attention to what White was doing, and played the "automatic" 13...a4, his position would have been worse. This time, we are going to see another game played by Uhlmann with yet another line where a different ..read more