News RSS

In any chess game, how you handle the opening clearly dictates the tone of the battle. When top-level chess players compete against each other, this fundamental concept is of paramount importance. FIDE Candidates is such a tournament where the world's elite compete for a shot at becoming the next world chess champion. The aim of this article is to compare the types of openings used during the 1971 FIDE candidate cycle, when legendary Bobby Fischer squared off with the leading players of his era, against the recently concluded FIDE candidate cycle in 2022, where modern day legend Hikaru Nakamura faced off with...

Although the recent chess boom has attracted many female players, the sport is still largely a man's game, which means that female interest in chess or chess players is much lower than in other physical sports such as football, basketball, or tennis. To this end, we conducted a social experiment using the popular pub game Kiss Marry Kill to examine whether ladies find leading chess players interesting, and if so, who will they pick when they are given the hypothetical chance to marry or date them.

If you have studied chess, opening theory should not be a new term for you. The chess opening theory covers sequences of moves and variations that players can deploy to avoid getting into trouble at the initial stages of the game. In this article, we try to look at such openings for black and their popularity among chess players including the master level players. We will provide the number of games a particular opening has been used and subsequently analyze the popularity and the possible reasons behind it. To collect statistics, we used lichess.org chess database one of the widely...

Chess has a vibrant history. From its inception 1500 years ago, romantic ear in the 1880s and to engine domination ear in 21^st century, the game has gone through several transformational stages. During this time chess has evolved significantly delivering us a wide range of openings, gambits, and theories underlying them. In this article, we try to provide the history of such chess openings and gambits.