Sam Loyd News Today

Each year we try to have something unusual for the final article of the year. While the endgame studies this time may not fulfill this criterion, your author wanted to provide some deeper, partially philosophical, thoughts. | Photo: Midjourney

Today we bring you the first instalment of solutions, to the puzzles on our Christmas Day page. It includes charming video of two 14 year old lads solving one of the problems. Today, both are Candidates for the World Championship. Solutions to the next six puzzle pages will follow soon – together with details on our composition competition, which will end on January 15.

Sad news out of California to start off this week: IM Jeremy Silman, one of the best-selling chess authors this country has ever produced, died Sept. 21 from a form of progressive dementia at the age of 69.

Herman Grooten is an International Master, a renowned trainer and the author of several highly acclaimed books about chess training and chess strategy. In the 129th instalment of his ChessBase show "Understanding before Moving", Herman continues his series "Chess history in a nutshell" and talks about tactics and the attacking and defending skills of Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official World Champion. | Photo: Pascal Simon

Today I’m returning to a subject I’ve covered a number of times in the past: passed pawns. Passed pawns are a crucial aspect of chess and your attitude to them can have a profound effect on how you play and, in particular, your opening choices. To explore this topic, I look at a game played by Vasilios Kotronias, in which he was overwhelmed by an absolute pawn avalanche. The final phase is extraordinary and somewhat reminiscent of the famous game McDonnell versus De La Bourdonnais.

Pattern recognition is a major feat of the human brain, albeit one that can lead to wrong outputs. Examples include seeing faces where there are none, known as pareidolia. Once it was believed that the planet Mars has a face structure on it, speculations about former inhabitants of the planet ran wild, later it turned out that this isn't the case and could be attributed to the low resolution of the photo. | Photo: Pixabay

Each week the Fort Wayne Chess club will offer tips for learning or improving your chess game.

Tired of thinking outside the box? Try thinking outside the dots, instead.

Last Tuesday Werner Keym, one of the most creative problemists we know, turned 80, and we celebrated his birthday with samples from his book "Anything but Average". Today we give you the solutions to the truly unique problems, hoping you enjoyed them and were able to come up with the solutions yourself.

Did you solve the Sam Loyd problem? The key is the move you would least expect! A week ago we showed you a small collection of delightful problems from the January issue of CHESS Magazine. Today we give you the solutions, annotated by Graham Phythian. You can figure out all the variations with the help of the built-in engines in our replay app.