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How you play chess reflects your actual personality. If you play chess with more timidity and reservation, you're likely a passive person who resorts to a diplomatic approach in the face of conflict. While a person who attacks like Mikhail Tal is likely to confront conflict head-on and rather impulsively. So, to what category do you belong?
With a nod to the Bard, we will once again look at games that involve attacks against the king. In response to last month’s column, I was sent our first game, with notes, by the winner. Patrick Walsh, also known as Konchog, describes himself as, “a deaf-blind chess player whose first tournament was the 1972 Texas Open – the tournament where Ken Smith introduced the Smith-Morra Gambit, and the tournament that also produced one of the finest endgames ever played, a masterpiece by Botvinnik against Reshevsky.
An exciting pair of matches, featuring seven decisive games, saw Hikaru Nakamura beating Fabiano Caruana twice to win the Chessable Masters. Nakamura played the Smith-Morra Gambit twice with white, including a game in which he only needed a draw. In Division II, Nodirbek Abdusattorov got the better of Maxime Vachier-Lagrave to secure a spot in Division I of the next Champions Chess Tour event.
The final day of the Charity Cup preliminaries had its fair share of drama, with half the players getting knocked out of the competition after 15 rounds. Praggnanandhaa and Richard Rapport did not make the cut, with Pragg missing winning chances before losing his last game of the prelims against David Anton. Anton, who came from scoring wins in the two previous rounds, climbed all the way up to fourth place thanks to this victory and will face Jan-Krzysztof Duda in the quarterfinals. | Photo: Alina l’Ami
The Sicily|Sicilian defense is one of the most fundamental chess tactics that a player new to the game should master. It is a classic defensive manuever...