Chess Tutoring, Chess Coaching, Chess Classes with NM Will Stewart

The Opocensky Variation of the Sicilian Najdorf with 6. Be2 remains one of the most commonly played lines for white against the Najdorf. In Fischer’s time in the 1950s and 1960s, more aggressive variations such as the Fischer-Sozin Attack, the 6. Bg5 Main Line, and the 6. f4 Amsterdam Variation were favored over the quieter Opocensky Variation with 6. Be2. However sufficient sources of counterplay were identified for black against the sharper continuations, and in [...]

The value of the truth is an enduring trope of the American cinema. In Tom Cruise’s Vanilla Sky, the protagonist is offered a choice to live in a world of his fancy, or to face the sometimes-gritty truth of a world far more real. Ditto the Matrix movie in which the main character can take either the blue pill or red pill. I chose the red one and, apparently, was involved in a chess game shortly [...]

The 2012 World Chess Championship is taking place in Moscow, Russia on May 11-30 and features two of the best players in the game today: Defending World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand (India) and World Chess Championship Challenger Boris Gelfand (Israel). These two seasoned veterans in the chess elite are fighting it out for a prize fund of $2.5 million dollars (the winner will receive $1.5 million and the loser will receive $1 million). While Anand [...]

In Lev Alburt’s seminal Test and Improve your Chess he offers an interesting recommendation. The GM, once one of the world’s best players, says we should be willing to invest a few hours into analyzing any given position. This develops the fabled GM memory which is said to hold ten times more patterns than the brain of an average NM. Putting thirty-two pieces into some semblance of order takes quite a lot of work indeed. [...]

The 2012 US Chess Championship kicked off with a bang yesterday with 5 out of 6 games reflecting a decisive result in the first round. The clear favorite to win the event is US #1 and World #7 rated Hikaru Nakamura, who began with a clean win over rising star Robert Hess. Although Nakamura is only 24 years old, he is already an experienced veteran at the elite levels of chess. In this exciting round [...]

What is a clearance sacrifice? One player, in this case white, voluntarily moves a piece into danger when that offending chessman blocks a key rank, file, diagonal, or important square. He simply imagines: a) the advantage that would accrue to him if he seized a particular bit of the chessboard. b) the value of the sacrificed material in comparison with the first calculation. A successful clearance sacrifice almost always requires one of the following factors [...]

This video covers an absolutely insane blitz chess battle, featuring two of today’s best YouTube chess personalities: Kingscrusher as white and the ChessNetwork as black. I thoroughly recommend my readers/fans to check out these two awesome YouTube chess channels. This game starts off with Kingscrusher playing e4 and subsequently responding to ChessNetwork’s Sicilian Defense with the Closed Sicilian Attack (notably employing a variation with Nf3 that Boris Spassky used to play in the 1960s and [...]