Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Stalemate
Almost every chess player has ever blundered into a stalemate after reaching a winning game. That happens even to GMs. Stalemates often happens after a huge blunder, but sometimes they are the result of...
Category: Traps, Tricks & Mistakes
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: More Missed Chances
Uzbek GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov seems to exert a disturbing influence on his opponents during the games. In a previous post we saw the game he played against GM Anish Giri in the FIDE World...
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Bouncing Back
The FIDE Women’s Grand Prix 2024/25 consisted of six tournaments played according to the round-robin system. A total of 21 players take part in the Grand Prix, but only 10 in each event. And...
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Puzzles
Solving a chess puzzles is not exactly like playing a move or a sequence of moves in a game. A game of chess is like a story with beginning and end. A puzzle is...
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Mixing Everything
The FIDE Women’s Grand Prix 2024/25 consisted of six tournaments played according to the round-robin system. The time control was 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, plus 30 minutes from move 40. There...
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: The Subtle Castle
Goa, India hosted the FIDE World Cup 2025 from 1 to 26 November. It was a 206-player field with eight rounds of single-elimination knockout. In each round, players faced in two classical games of...
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: ISP
Boris Spassky (1937-2025) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia (then Leningrad, Soviet Union) on January 30, 1937. In the summer of 1941, during the World War II, Boris and his older brother, George, were...
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Teacher Surpassed
Magnus Carlsen is for many the best chess player in history. He has reached the highest rating ever (ELO 2882, May 2014). Since Carlsen became the world number-one in the ELO ranking in 2011,...
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Two Schools
Paul Charles Morphy (1837 – 1884) was a genius American chess player. Despite his short chess career, his contemporaries considered Morphy as the world’s greatest chess master. Morphy was born in New Orleans to...
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Illegal Castle
Everyone expects that players know the rules of chess when participating in official competitions. When beginners start playing chess, they learn how to move pieces. Along that process, they learn a special move: castle....
