dimanche 26 août 2012

Chess Links

Here are some good chess links:

http://www.chesscube.com/ : A good free website to play chess. A lot of tournaments everyday, even special ones called Warzones. In these, you play as many games as you can within a given time. The quicker you win, the most games you play.

http://chesstempo.com/ : A great website to train tactical skills. There are  thousands of tactical puzzles, which have a rating. By subscribing for free, you get a rating and are given puzzles according to your strength.

http://www.chessclub.com/ : The most popular and best paying website. You get to play thousands of opponents, at any time control. Lots of IMs and GMs are playing there, including some of the top GMs, like Nakamura.

http://www.echecs-online.fr/ A small but nice website to play. It is a French website, which is rare on the Internet. That is not where you meet the strongest opponents, but some are pretty good.

http://gmsmirnov.com/#oid=1111_10 : A blog made by a strong GM, containing lots of free lessons.

These are my favorite chess websites, which I wanted to share with you. If you know any other good website, feel free to leave comments.

mercredi 8 août 2012

Chess Advice for Beginners


Here's a little advice I gave someone recently.

When your thinking process is good, you almost don't have to learn openings. You can play pretty solid moves without studying them because you understand them. Of course, you still have to learn variations. It becomes easier and faster once your thinking process is good. Understanding why a move is accurate is 100000000000000000000000000000% more important than memorizing any variations.

I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but there are many kinds of advantages:
space advantage, material advantage of course, more development, better pawn structure, pieces ankered on good outposts, controlling an open file just to name a few. These are all things a player should know.
However, here's something simpler. Chess is all about keeping your pieces as fluently active as possible.
Gaining space gives you more room to manoeuvre your pieces whereas outposts give your pieces more scope. Finally, weak pawns can be targeted and overloaded or tactically won.
All these kinds of advantages are related to getting your pieces more active. Understanding these essential notions allows us to know when it is good to get a specific kind of advantage.