7/28/2024 – Pieces have various roles in different stages of the game. Have you heard of 'marathon bishops'? GM Sundararajan Kidambi explores the concept, which he found while going through GM Axel Smith's book on colour complexes. Check out the detailed analysis, which employed a game by living legend Boris Gelfand to enrich your understanding of this new terminology - the concept is not new, though! | Photo: Shahid Ahmed

3/29/2024 – All chess players aspire to create a lasting masterpiece over the board. And if sacrifices appeal to the artistic side of a chess player, what can be a better way than to sacrifice the most powerful of all pieces, the queen? GM Sundararajan Kidambi presents three games featuring remarkable (positional) queen sacrifices! | Pictured: Karthikeyan Murali | Photo: Niklesh Jain / ChessBase India

2/25/2024 – Vasily Smyslov had this to say about beauty in chess: “Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty that are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp”. This quote and a fascinating endgame from the Candidates Tournament in Yekaterinburg prompted GM Sundararajan Kidambi to consider new ways to approach a chess position. The endgame was played in the game between Wang Hao (pictured) and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. | Photo: FIDE / Lennart Ootes

1/11/2024 – Timing is a key factor in chess. As noted by the inimitable Bobby Fischer: “Chess is a matter of delicate judgement, knowing when to punch and how to duck”. GM Sundararajan Kidambi explores this all-important theme using games by Levon Aronian, Vishy Anand and Stockfish/Leela! | Photo: Amruta Mokal

10/1/2023 – Control of the centre has been considered to be the heart of chess strategy from time immemorial. As José Raúl Capablanca pointed out, the fundamentals remain the same, though application may change in the course of time. The Cuban world champion wrote: “In chess the tactics may change but the strategic fundamental principles are always the same”. | GM Sundararajan Kidambi analyses three ‘hypermodern’ games.

6/16/2023 – Endgame theory consists of various concepts. Unlike the opening, the theory in the endgame is not getting influenced by the computer. Knowing certain concepts will always help to understand various endgame theories. Correspondence squares is one of those must-know concepts. Is it only limited to pawn endgames? GM Sundararajan Kidambi explores a concept which he found quite complex since his childhood. | Photo: Shahid Ahmed

3/6/2023 – Referring to Boris Gelfand’s style, Vladimir Kramnik wrote: “What impresses me most is his ability to create games, where all the moves, from the first to the last, are as though links in a single logical chain”. GM Sundararajan Kidambi analyses Gelfand’s win over Vishy Anand at the 2012 World Championship match in Moscow, a perfect example of the Israeli’s brilliant strategic aptitude. | Photo: Rodrigo Fernandez

2/15/2023 – Grandmasters Anish Giri and Sandipan Chanda gave master classes on the same day (21 Oct 2022) in ProChess, and I got to witness the interesting chess lessons being discussed in those sessions. Any chess fan would be thrilled with it, and my experience was absolutely fascinating! In this article, I share a few interesting positions and thought processes I encountered from these sessions. | Photo: Shahid Ahmed

1/5/2023 – Can a unit of our army be a friend or foe depending on the circumstances? From experience, we know that the answer is a resounding yes! GM Sundararajan Kidambi explains the beautiful concept of using your opponent’s piece to your advantage instead of always being bent on automatically going for the recapture.

9/28/2022 – Castling is a privilege which both sides have in each game. Despite the choices being two, a player can castle only once in the entire game. The choice often determines the fate of the game. It might seem easy, yet the underlying consequences of a correct or a misjudgement can be long term. GM Sundararajan Kidambi shows two examples of former world champions’ games where one of the contenders made an incorrect call. Check out the grandmaster’s detailed analysis and enrich your knowledge.

4/16/2022 – Every chess player has a unique style of preparing — some like to study classics, some follow the latest updates, others rely heavily on engines. However, there is one common thread between most of the top elite-level players: they have all studied the classics. Thus, GM Sundararajan Kidambi decided to decode Jose Raul Capablanca’s brilliance and showcased it with a few examples. He posed an important question: if the best of the best learned and got inspired by the studying the classics, why can’t we do the same?

2/27/2022 – The most exciting and talked-about game of the 2021 World Championship was game 6. Statistically, the sixth game of a World Championship match has yielded more decisive results than any other game. This one proved to be no exception, as records kept tumbling. The game had various layers of action and consequences. GM Sundararajan Kidambi explains the game arising out of a Catalan opening. | Photo: Shahid Ahmed

2/3/2022 – Each position can be observed and dissected differently by players of varying strength. The more one knows about various aspects of the game, the more nuances one looks for. A beginner may not understand why someone would spend plenty of time thinking in a position that occurred numerous times, while a strong master will try to rummage through the previous plans and come up with something original. GM Sundararajan Kidambi shows various examples to illustrate this idea. | Photo: Shahid Ahmed

10/29/2018 – Chess is a beautiful game, but sometimes the beauty is not so obvious to an untrained eye. When an experienced grandmaster like SUNDARARJAN KIDAMBI carefully studies a game between two world-class players, you know that you are in for a treat. Kidambi doesn't do a superficial job. He puts himself into the shoes of Wesley So and tries to understand the logic behind his every move. When studied carefully, this can seriously help you improve your chess understanding as well as appreciate the art of the game.