House of Chess in Copenhagen Mikkel Nørgaard is the Chief Learning Officer for Dansk Skoleskak (Danish School Chess), which recently opened a brain gym in Denmark. I met Nørgaard at the 2023 London Chess Conference, where I presented about science team initiatives such as the Chessable Research Awards, https://www.chessable.com/research_awards. For a video of Chessable Science Project Manager Karel van Delft interviewing Nørgaard in London:London Chess Conference 2023 interview Mikkel Nørgaard In February of 2024, Van Delft conducted a Zoom interview with Nørgaard. Courtesy of Dansk Skoleskak ..read more

Who doesn’t want to become invincible? An impossible task, I will immediately admit, but a goal that is worth striving for. Everybody is striving for it and some, in limited periods of time, manage to achieve it. Capablanca went 8 years without losing a game, Carlsen, Ding Liren and Tiviakov had more than 100 games going without a loss. These are only a selected few, for us lesser mortals, these feats seem superhuman. And yet, it is possible to achieve some level of invincibility when playing our peers, even if it is on the level of our own local club. So, what is the big secret? The secret is ..read more

When Dr. Barry Hymer retired as Chessable’s Chief Science Officer in April of 2022, chess research was already in progress. One of Dr. Hymer’s projects was with Dr. Nemanja Vaci of the University of Sheffield. Vaci’s Chess Prodigy Project continued with Chessable’s support under Chessable’s new Chief Science Officer Dr. Alexey Root. In this blog post, Dr. Vaci and his colleagues report on their profile analysis of Grandmaster (GM) Abhimanyu Mishra. The profile analysis of the youngest GM in chess, Abhimanyu Mishra by Daisy Matthews, Merim Bilalić, Roland Grabner, and Nemanja Vaci In the realm ..read more

One of Fischer’s original ideas, the move …g5 in the Sicilian/Hedgehog structures was first implemented in his game against Garcia Soruco at the Havana Olympiad in 1966. In this position, Fischer played 14…Kh8! With the idea of …Rg8 and …g5, starting an unexpected attack on the kingside. Fischer repeated this idea four years later in an exhibition game against Ulf Andersson, played immediately after the Siegen Olympiad. White continued with 13.Kh1! with the idea of Rg1 and g4. It is very likely that Fischer first saw this idea in one of Morphy’s games. He was an ardent student of Morphy and ..read more

The Chessable Research Awards for the Fall 2023 cycle had two winners, undergraduate student Aditya Gupta and graduate student Denise Trippold. In this guest blog post, Woman FIDE Master Denise Trippold writes about her research, which was supervised by Roland H. Grabner (University of Graz, Austria) and Merim Bilalić (Northumbria University, United Kingdom). The aim of her master’s thesis is to examine the relations between chess skill and different psychological variables to identify psychological indicators of chess talent. Talent Identification in Youth Chess Players by Denise Trippold On ..read more

Fresh off the back of the 2023 Chessable Awards, we’ve got another round of awards to be announced, the winners of the 2023 Create Your Own Course contest. The CYOC awards are rather unique in that these are the courses that you as Chessablers have submitted and which we’ve judged to be the best. The decision process was not easy. Chessable community members submitted a plethora of excellent courses. And even those that have not taken home a prize may still go on to flourish. One example is Can Kabadayi, whose courses were so popular they went on to be converted into full video courses, and he ..read more

It’s one of the most exciting times of the year at Chessable. That’s right, it’s time to unveil the winners of the 2023 Chessable Awards. Thousands of Chessablers like you voted on what you thought were the best courses and authors to enter our catalog last year. In 2023, we had some of the biggest names in chess debut on Chessable. The likes of Levy Rozman, a.k.a Gotham Chess, and Fabiano Caruana published their first-ever courses for the platform, which were highly anticipated. Chessable is always looking to keep things fresh and engaging for the community by trying to make learning chess as ..read more

The Chessable Research Awards for the Fall 2023 cycle had two winners, undergraduate student Aditya Gupta and graduate student Denise Trippold. In this guest blog post, Aditya Gupta discusses the research he did with Dr. Nick Polson, Dr. Vadim Sokolov, and FIDE Trainer Shiva Maharaj. When Aditya received his Chessable Research Award, he was pursuing dual enrollment in mathematics through the University of Illinois. For the spring of 2024, he is matriculating as an incoming freshman in computer science at Stanford University. Contact Aditya at agupta42@stanford.edu Using Machine Learning to Val ..read more

In the first half of January my new course 1.d4 Simplified was published. In this post, I’d like to describe the process of how my courses come to life, at the same time sharing some examples from my latest one. In modern theory, all the main lines lead not only to equality but to positions where there is very little play left. This means that the primary idea of any opening preparation, especially with White, is to provide variations where there is play left in the position. In most cases, the position will be equal, it’s impossible to find an advantage for White against Black’s main openings ..read more

The sixth World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, was famous for his rigorous regime. A man of principle, once he determined a course of action, he followed it without fail. Botvinnik was the father of modern-day preparation. He invented the scientific approach to chess, how to prepare an opening, how to prepare against a certain player, how to analyse endgames and a player’s strengths and weaknesses. It is not surprising, therefore, that his most famous pupil, Garry Kasparov, followed his teacher’s methods. One of these methods was the approach to the pre-game routine. Botvinnik wrote that he ate ..read more