The mentioned site contains a lot of beautiful pictures, but this one is my favorite. It illustrates the beauty of chess.

The reason why many people hesitate to learn the game and to teach it to their children is that Chess has been misrepresented as a game which is very difficult to master. This false impression has been created mainly by the wrong methods of teaching usually employed. The majority of writers on Chess deal with a maze of variations and they expect the reader to memorize the moves with which to parry the maneuvers of the opponent, instead of simply developing a few common sense principles which are easy to grasp and perfectly sufficient to make a good player of any one.

This is really the great advantage of the game of Chess over any other board game, that it lends itself to the application of general principles, so that any one can grasp and enjoy it without memorizing more than the rules according to which the men move.

I have tried to develop these principles in a simple way so that they are sure to be easily understood, and I have been greatly aided in my task by Miss Helen Dvorak and Mr. Eugene Fuller, who, without any previous knowledge of the game, have learned it in reading through the manuscript of this book. They have given me many valuable hints in pointing out all that did not seem readily intelligible to the mind of the beginner.

The chess lessons series continues with taking free pieces, but you may want to have a look at the chess lessons index to get an overview of all the chess lessons.

Before I am going to write a lesson about this positioning of the opponent’s pieces I refer you to another site with some very interesting chess lessons, because it contains a lesson about Pushing the Enemy King into Line. The purpose of this lessons seems to be identical:

Our next task is to learn how to create that alignment when it doesn’t already exist. The principal tools we will use here are checks that push the king into a line with one of its fellow pieces, or that require an enemy piece to jump into line with its king to protect it. Or sometimes a capture may require a king to recapture and cause it to walk into a pin.

Therefor I am going to skip this lesson since a similar lesson exists at Chess Tactics Explained. This chess lessons site seems to be very interesting and consists of six chapters. These chapters deal with the following subjects:

1. Introduction
2. Double attack
3. Discovered attack
4. Pin and skewer
5. Removing the guard
6. Mating patterns

In addition to the on-line lessons a hard copy version of this site is available.
We continue with replacing a piece.

Downloading by means of ChessDB
Within the Tools menu of ChessDB a “Download Games from …” option is offered to download a database of 100,000 games in the Elo range 2290 to 2851 or a huge database of over 3.5 million games. In addition ChessDB offers a possibility to update this database by downloading games from TWIC and importing them into the database.

TWIC
Each week This Week in Chess (TWIC) publishes a new zip file with PGN files of recent games.
As mentioned above ChessDB has some functionality to download the recent chess games from The Week In Chess website, but you can also download the games by yourself (for example when using another database program).

ICOfY
Another free large database can be found at ICOfY. This large database contains more than 5 million games.

Chessopolis
If you are more interested in a specific opening the downloadable game collections at Chessopolis may be a nice place to start looking. Here you can find the Game collections by opening.

Next lesson will be about the ChessDB opening report.

For the creation of this chess material we will need some tools and one of the tools will be a chess database. However ChessBase is probably something that isnt affordable for most of the readers of this blog. Therefor I will use the free ChessDB during the next lessons.

But do we need a database to study chess?
No, you probably need more than one database:

• The first database contains all the games you have played,
• the second database contains games of possible opponents,
• the third database is just a large database which can be used to check how other players are trying to solve specific positions, openings, endgames, …
• and the last (fourth) database can be used to store the generated lessons.

And we probably may add some databases dealing with specific openings or other interesting stuff.
But even without all these databases ChessDB can be used to enter and save your own games, analyzing them by means of Crafty and/or Toga II or making use of the included endgame tablebases.

The ChessDB tutorial may be a good starting point for further reading.

Next chess lesson will be about some free alternatives for a large chess database.

ChessGuru.net focus mainly on teaching beginning and intermediate players and it does that in a series of step by step, easy to follow chess tutorials.

If you don’t know anything about chess you may want to start with chess rules. You will learn here about the rules: the pieces, how to move, how to setup the chess board and so on…

The site chessguru.net contains online chess tutorials for beginning and intermediate players, which can be compared to our categories Rules, Beginner and Intermediate 1.

From this last mentioned post I like the fact that There’s always an exception to a rule, in this case the advantage of the fast piece development.

One of the cornerstones of chess strategy is a fast development of the pieces and a quick castle – in most cases it’s highly recommended (I’d even say necessary) to accomplish development of the pieces and put a king in the safe place before starting any active operations. There are countless examples of severe punishment in case one of the sides had left his king in the center for the middlegame. However, under right circumstances, delaying castle and starting an active piece play could be very rewarding.

GM Alex Finkel’s article perfectly illustrates this.

Some of these endgames are very interesting. Yesterday the 28th endgame study in this series has been published.

Using the applet on the Knowledge4IT site all of the currently published Nalimov Tablebases can be queried online (incl. 6-men databases). On this Web Query page you are able to check some of these sometimes very difficult endgames.

By checking this tablebases we see that the given position, which arose after 66 moves in the game between Stellan Brynell (2501) and Mihail Krasenkow (2651) in the 4th round of the Corus Chess Tournament 2007 (C), turns out to be a mate in 41 problem.

The specific endgame is rather remarkable because in contradiction to the endgame without the pawn Black’s additional pawn will be the reason that White is able to win the game.

Both players turned out to be rather unfamiliar with this kind of endplay and the game ended in a draw. White played 67.Ne4! after which Black continued with 67…Kg7?! and now we have a mate in 25 problem. Instead of the appropriate move 68.Nd6, White played 68.Kf5?! after which 41 moves are needed again.