Game Spotlight: 61st NCC Open 6
Let’s look at one of the endgames played in the 61st Nairobi Chess Club Open Championship. In this game, we end up with a Rook endgame where White has an outside passed pawn. We’ll...
Tagged: Endgame
Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: One Short Step
If making mistakes in the opening is frustrating, making them in the endgame is painful. Not only because the fact of making the mistake and losing the game in a miserable way (sometimes the...
Game Spotlight: The Fighting King
A lot of endgame knowledge is very technical. But there’s one rule that shows up the most often, and is most associated with winning an endgame — getting your King active. To understand why...
Game Spotlight: Looking for Endgame Patterns
Improving at chess means improving your endgame skills. The good news is that quite a bit of this improvement involves learning some simple patterns that show up frequently, and applying them. The game we’ll...
Game Spotlight: 2019 Le Pelley Cup 3
During the Le Pelley Cup, I came across the following game in progress. It was the endgame, Black had a pawn advantage in a Rook endgame, and I quickly thought he could just take...
Game Spotlight: 2019 Kenya Premier Chess League, More from Week 1
Of course, every game the Nairobi Chess Club played during the first superweekend of the Kenya Premier Chess League wasn’t a win. Here’s an interesting loss from down the boards. While Black falls behind...
Game Spotlight: 2019 Capablanca Cup 4
In this selection from the 2019 Capablanca Cup, we see a nice example of a classic endgame. Our next event is coming up fast. The 4th Peter Le Pelley Cup, commemorating our former Chairman,...
Game Spotlight: Received Wisdom
This is inspired by a story that NM Dan Heisman tells with some regularity. At one point he was coaching Howard Stern (yes, that Howard Stern) and got Stern to play a bunch of...
Game Spotlight: 2018 Olympiad 2
Although information about new CM and FM titles has been hard to come by, there is one exception. Thanks to the reporting of AllAfrica, we can say that Uganda’s Gloria Nansubuga won herself a...
Game Spotlight: NCC 60th Open 7
I knew I wanted to highlight this game as soon as I input it at the 2018 Nairobi Chess Club Open Championship. There’s two things I think are notable about this game. First, White does...
