For our final article of this series on the world champions and their contributions to opening theory, we focus on the current champion, Magnus Carlsen. As many of you have commented on the earlier articles, it is difficult to link Carlsen with a ...
Like Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand became FIDE world champion by virtue of his victory in a world championship tournament -- this one held in Mexico City, 2007. However, the chess public, which has always tended to see the championship changi...
San Luis, Argentina, 2005: A double-round-robin tournament was held to determine the FIDE world champion. In those days the world championship was still split after Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short left FIDE for their 1993 match. The chess world l...
Before the 2000 world championship match between Vladimir Kramnik and Garry Kasparov, the latter had been champion since long before I started playing chess. Kasparov dominated the chess world and seemed unbeatable. I naturally assumed that he wou...
After Anatoly Karpov came Garry Kasparov, the 13th world champion. Kasparov took opening preparation to possibly the most extreme level of any champions before or since. His deep explorations, with the help of a team of grandmasters and -- a new p...
After his famous 1972 victory over Boris Spassky in the so-called "Match of the Century," Bobby Fischer stopped playing chess. He did not compete in any tournaments as the world champion. When Anatoly Karpov emerged as his challenger in 1975,...
After Boris Spassky came the most famous chess player ever: Bobby Fischer. Fischer was the world champion with the most limited and consistent opening repertoire. Indeed, Fischer had an attitude that there must be one correct way of playing in e...
The 10th world champion, Boris Spassky, was a universal player with a wide opening repertoire. He mostly played classical openings with a healthy aggression. One weapon, which served him well throughout his career, was a rather surprising move: 4....
Tigran Petrosian, the ninth world champion, gained the title in his 1963 match with Mikhail Botvinnik. Thus the Botvinnik era came to a close, since the automatic rematch clause (which allowed Botvinnik to regain the championship after one year fr...
Botvinnik had regained the title from Smyslov in their 1958 rematch, but soon he had a new challenger: the fiery Latvian player Mikhail Tal. Tal had appeared out of nowhere, and within a few years went from an unknown young player to a challenge...
Although Vasily Smyslov was only the world champion for one year, he is nevertheless remembered as among the greatest players ever, and his matches with Mikhail Botvinnik dominated chess in the 1950s. All in all, they played three matches, with ...
After World War Two, the chess world (and the world in general) was abruptly changed. It is very clear that a demarcation line can be placed at 1945 between the old classical chess and modern chess. There were many changes in the chess world aro...
In 1935 a surprising thing happened. The fourth world champion, Alexander Alekhine, widely considered a genius, lost a match to the Dutch master, Max Euwe. Euwe was unique among world champions for several reasons. First, he was the only one who...
Alexander Alekhine won the title from Jose Raul Capablanca in their 1927 match. The Franco-Russian master had an unusually wide opening repertoire compared to the earlier champions, and he loved to experiment with different openings. So while A...
Like Emanuel Lasker, his successor, Jose Raul Capablanca, was less of a theoretician and more of a keen practical player. Lasker utilized his great psychological understanding and clever trickiness, while Capablanca's skill rested in his innate un...
The second world champion, Emanuel Lasker, is a difficult one to include in this series, but it must be done. There is hardly any opening to which he is closely attached. He played a wide variety of solid, "common-sense" openings, w...
Opening choice is a very complicated subject, bound up not just in questions of chess theory and principles, but also in individual personality and style, and even the current state of society. When picking an opening today you need to consider ...
Among the less-trodden paths White can follow against the Sicilian Defense is the system with the seemingly paradoxical combination of Nc3 and Bb5. To my knowledge, this variation, unlike most of the other anti-Sicilians, has no name....
For a long time, the Petroff Defense (also known as the Russian Defense) has been a very solid weapon in situations where a draw is acceptable for Black. Through the end of the 20th century it featured prominently in top level tournaments, especia...
Garry Kasparov, the 13th world champion, is closely connected to the King's Indian Defense. Indeed, he has created much of the foundation of what the opening is today. Yet, early on in his epic rivalry with Anatoly Karpov, Kasparov restricted hi...
In today's world of competitive chess, it is easy to imagine that you have to surprise your opponent every time. That you have to continually rotate your openings to avoid preparation. That you cannot develop a deep understanding of an opening wit...
After six rounds of the Zalakaros Open in Hungary, I had four points -- which was not a bad score, since the average of my opponents' ratings was high. Earlier in the tournament, I was sure that it was time for me to give up chess, or at...
In part one of my series on the Zalakaros Open, I described coming to Hungary and showed the first three games I played in the tournament. Honestly, the tournament didn't have a good start. Not only did I lose with the white pieces against GM Ga...
It has been some time since I wrote about my own tournaments or annotated my own games. In general, it seems more legitimate and honest to annotate one's own games. You know precisely what was going on in your head, you remember your emotions, wha...
In the early 21st century, a new permutation of the evergreen Sicilian Dragon appeared: rather than place the queen's rook, obviously, on the open c-file, to put it instead on the closed b-file, supporting an advance of the b-pawn: 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3...
