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Outside of the Café de la Regénce, Simpson's Divan is possibly the best known chess venue in history. Like the Café de la Regénce, many great chess players frequented the establishment. Oscar Conrad Müller, who started attending the Divan ... | Read More
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There are few tactics more powerful than double check. Not only can it end a game abruptly, it's often hard to see it coming until some sacrifice reveals it lurking in the background. In the game below John Schulten, a German-American master ... | Read More
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Many time we are given puzzles and, since we know there is something immediate to be found, the solution, even if it's a little offbeat, can be readly found. This was the case for me with the following position. But, on the other hand when such... | Read More
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Even extremely strong players miss things. While they might have great sight of the board, sometimes they lack a smidgen of X-ray vision. An x-ray is a hard-to-define tactic that encompasses several different ideas. Some peo... | Read More
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Some of the quotes about Morphy below were supplied by his Great Successors ; some by just great players.
Richard Réti
Morphy was the first positional player who, unlike his Romantic rivals, understood the strategic basis for attack. He wr... | Read More
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Anastasia's Mate, a lovely corridor mate involving a Rook and a Knight, was first exhibited in a book from where it's name derived, Anastasia and the Game of Chess ( Anastasia und das Schachspiel). Published in 1803, it the last book by... | Read More
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This game comes from the 1912 tournament in San Sebastian, Spain. Rudolf Spielmann finished third compared to Siegbert Tarrasch's fourth place, but Tarrasch completely dominated his tactically-brilliant opponent in the game below and found this... | Read More
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Morphy never played William Steinitz, but it's apparent that even in 1862, during the time that Morphy was bowing out of competitive chess, Steinitz would have been a formidable opponent. Augustus Mongredien, Steintitz' victim in the game below... | Read More
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This position from the Kasparov-Karpov World Championship, 1985 was noted in Lev Alburt's Secrets of the Russian Chess Masters: Beyond the Basics. According to Kasparov, Karpov made a hasty, though natural move which turned out to be a subtle, t... | Read More
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In 1950 Mark Taimanov had just earned the newly created IM title. The same year he and his wife performed a series of concerts across the USSR. His future chess success is retroactively evident in his insight into the position below.
This ... | Read More