There’s a big part about Chessable courses that we sometimes forget – they’re living things. Mistakes are fixed, theory gets updated, and authors react to the latest student questions. So in our new series, Going Above and Beyond, we’re highlighting the authors who go above and beyond to keep their courses up to date, answer your questions, and make their courses the best they can be. Today we’re celebrating FM Christopher Kuberczyk’s latest update to his popular The Hybrid Grunfeld-Slav course.  FM Kuberczyk hovered around 2150 as an adult before making a serious attempt to improve ..read more

Top image: Online ChessQuiz by Laszlo Moldovan (Schaakacademie Apeldoorn)Bottom image: IM Mark Dvoretsky and GM Artur Yusupov, Apeldoorn 2010 (photo team captain Karel van Delft) Candidate moves: When you see a good move, look for a better one Chessable science team research paper Authors: Karel van Delft, Sipke Ernst, Dries Wedda When you see a good move, look for a better one. Look for candidate moves, the moves that deserve attention when you decide about how to continue in a position. But, how to choose them and is this trainable? A workgroup of the Chessable science team did research ..read more

Raúl Sánchez García and Héctor Laiz Ibáñez are currently conducting a qualitative study on cheating in online chess, whose preliminary findings they describe in a two-part blog entry. This blog post is the first of the two parts. Chessable provided support to their research. University students and faculty research sponsors starting or continuing chess-themed research may apply before May 15 at https://www.chessable.com/research_awards for Chessable Research Awards. Cheating in online chess (Part I): suspicions of engine assistance The advent of digital platforms in chess has significantly enh ..read more

The King’s Indian Attack. Ever since I was a child, I had mixed feelings about it. The main reason – because there was never an attack. Of course, I knew Fischer’s famous games where he was destroying his opponents (against Myagmarsuren is the most famous destruction), but when I would analyse a bit on my own I could never crash through Black’s kingside, especially if he played …h6 when White threatened to play h6 himself (for some reason they never played this against Fischer, always allowing him to push h6 (or …h3 when he was playing Black, for example in this game against Nikolic) and fatal ..read more

We’ve changed the default way to study new courses!  As many of you already know, there are two settings to learn and review variations: Key Moves and All Moves. Before today, the default setting was to study Key Moves, meaning you would only learn and review the ‘new moves’ in a variation, and bypass all the moves you previously learned.  After some research and discussion, however, we decided to change this default setting to All Moves, so you will learn and review the entire variation from move 1 each time.  While this can be a bit tedious, we find this is much more promising ..read more

There’s a big part about Chessable courses that we sometimes forget – they’re living things. Mistakes are fixed, theory gets updated, and authors react to the latest student questions. So in our new series Going Above and Beyond, we’re highlighting authors who go above and beyond to keep their courses up to date, answer your questions, and make their courses the best they can be. Today we’re celebrating GM Àlvar Alonso Rosell’s latest update to his Lifetime Repertoires: Alonso’s Catalan. Àlvar is a strong Spanish grandmaster and the 2nd youngest Spanish Chess Champion in history. His biggest s ..read more

There’s a big part about Chessable coursers we sometimes forget – they’re living things. They’re like books, in that they contain a lot of similar information to chess books. However, books don’t have video. books don’t have the ability to train the information. And perhaps mostly importantly, books don’t get regular updates. Chessable courses are alive – mistakes are fixed, theory gets updated, and authors react to the latest information. So in our new series Going Above and Beyond, we’re highlighting the authors who go above and beyond to keep their courses up to date, answer your questions ..read more

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