Michaël van Liempt

Mittens

It's TIME For Chess.com

The chess website Chess.com has been named in TIME Magazine's prestigious list of 100 Most Influential Companies of 2023. “For the last 17 years we have been focused on our mission of serving and growing the chess community. It’s a huge and humbling honor to have this recognized. Chess has the power to impact and improve lives, and I’m incredibly happy to see that recognized by TIME.”- Erik Allebest, Co-founder and CEO of Chess.com With much of social life on hold during the pandemic and the overwhelming success of the Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit, the amount of people who started playing chess online skyrocketed. As the world's leading online chess platform, Chess.com has seen such an explosive growth that it is named in the (formerly print; now digital only) magazine TIME's prestigious 100 Most Influential Companies of 2023 list.In the same category of "Disrupters" (new dominant players in existing fields) we find companies such as Canva (graphic design tools with artificial175

Positional Chess Rook Sacrifice by Manuel Bosboom

Positional Chess Rook Sacrifice by Manuel Bosboom

What makes chess exciting? This is a question that can be answered in many ways. Different chess-players value different things, depending on personal proclivities and tastes.There is one thing, however, that never fails to impress: Sacrifices. Sacrifices in chess have many uses. Many of these are tactical: setting up a double attack or pin, gaining access to the opponent's king, luring the enemy king into a mating net, eliminating defences and ensuring the promotion of a passed pawn are but a few of the tactical objectives for which material can be offered up. There are also positional considerations that may warrant the investment of one's own wood. This is most clearly seen in gambits: pawns are deliberately placed en pris to accelerate one's own development and forming of a pawn centre, or to disrupt the opponent's plans. These positional sacrifices usually come in the form of a pawn, minor piece, or Exchange. Much less common is the sacrifice of a full rook, and that is precisely what175

Techniques of Positional Play

The Chess Book on Strategy Every Russian Kid Has Studied

The last days of January saw an explosion in the orders for the book "Techniques of Positional Play" by IM Valeri Bronznik and FM Anatoli Terekhin. Popular Twitch-streamer Andrea Botez (from the Twitch and YouTube channels "BotezLive") released a video on YouTube featuring fellow streamer WGM Dina Belenkaya. In this video they discuss a position between Lajos Portisch and Bobby Fischer, taken from the book that the video description indicates as "the book on strategy every Russian kid has studied". Originally written in Russian by Terekhin, later revised and updated by Bronznik, and translated into German, "Techniques" first saw the light of day in 2005. It was translated to English in 2013 by New In Chess and has received overwhelmingly positive critical acclaim since. It takes one glance at the reviews to get a taste of the enthusiasm with which "Techniques" was embraced upon its release. So, what makes "Techniques of Positional Play" such a highly regarded book? The key word is "efficiency"175