1/14/2018 – A reader from Sweden gets a second crack at Jon who looks at two wild gambit games. Fancy Jon taking a look at your games? Send them in! If you appear in the Agony column, not only will you get free detailed commentary of your games by one of chess’s great authors and instructors, and former world no. 4 player, but you also win a free three-month ChessBase Premium Account!

12/31/2017 – A Happy New year to readers as we embark on the final Agony column of this year with two fascinating games by Murray Campbell. Fancy Jon taking a look at your games? Send them in! If you appear in the Agony column, not only will you get free detailed commentary of your games by one of chess’s great authors and instructors, and former world no. 4 player, but you also win a free three-month ChessBase Premium Account!

12/17/2017 – Morgon from Canada plays well positionally...before it all goes pear shaped. JS has the blow-by-blow. Fancy Jon taking a look at your games? Send them in! If you appear in the Agony column, not only will you get free detailed commentary of your games by one of chess’s great authors and instructors, and former world no. 4 player, but you also win a free three-month ChessBase Premium Account!

11/26/2017 – Trefor relates a heart-felt love for our game, and does Jon a small Caïssaic mitzvah to boot! Fancy Jon taking a look at your games? Send them in! If you appear in the Agony column, not only will you get free detailed commentary of your games by one of chess’s great authors and instructors, and former world no. 4 player, but you also win a free three-month ChessBase Premium Account!

11/12/2017 – Jon looks at a pair of exciting if blunderful games from an enthusiastic Chilean amateur. Want Jon to take a look at your games? Send them in, and if selected, not only will you get free detailed commentary of your games by one of chess’s great authors and instructors, and former world no. 4 player, but you also win a free three-month ChessBase Premium Account!

10/30/2017 – This week GM Jon Speelman takes a break from amateur games to look at a new theme: when your engines let you down. Two famous examples from World Championship history — Kasparov vs. Anand (1995) and Kramnik vs. Leko (2004), plus two recent ones from the Isle of Man and the European Club Cup. Want Jon to take a look at your games? Send them in, and if selected, not only will you get free detailed commentary of your games by one of chess’s great authors and instructors, and former world no. 4 player, but you also win a free three-month ChessBase Premium Account! | Photo: Chess.com / Maria Emelianova

10/8/2017 – This week's games are by John Thornton, a Welshman who was 70 earlier this year. Years ago, he sent me some corrections for my book 'Analysing the Endgame' and he says, very pleasingly that: "I recently went back to that to provide material for a session that I ran at a local club where I used analysis of the famous Spassky vs. Fischer game — the analysis you gave holding up exceedingly well against computer analysis."

9/17/2017 – This week's games are by Andreas Niedersberger, pictured playing chess against his very beautiful cat, which apparently has a predilection for the Rubinstein French. Andreas gave up chess — a childhood hobby — at age fourteen, and only when his own children had grown up a bit did he return to the game. His two games feature a Tarrasch (or Semi-Tarrasch) and an open Sicilian.

9/3/2017 – Rudy van Kemenade featured in Agony #1 sixteen months ago and this week becomes our first repeat. After a veritable tsunami of submissions when this column first appeared the water level has now fallen, so that our Grandmaster Agony columnist's lead time is quite short. Please send in your games if you'd like them to appear, and you are more than welcome to send games even if you've already done so before. | Photo: Dyfed Chess Association Publicity Gallery

8/20/2017 – This week's column comes from the game of San Francisco bay area computer scientist Dr. Shivaji Shivkumar (pictured), a FIDE Master, with experience on open source chess projects. He sent in two games: a win over GM Anna Zatonskih, and a loss against GM Georg Meier.

8/6/2017 – This week's pair of games are by Rodolfe Prevot a Frenchman in his mid fifties. who is currently rated 1867. Rodolfe writes: “I am 55 years old. After a life as a French teacher, I have decided to become a chess trainer (you can see two of my pupils from Blois on the photo above) and to improve my level of play (that shouldn't be too difficult!). Always in love with chess, I like to play, learn and teach!”

7/23/2017 – "When Nigel Short played Garry Kasparov in 1993 I watched it on TV, found I could still predict some of the moves and then entered the local chess congress where I was living in Exeter. I've be playing ever since as a keen amateur mostly in Devon and the year before last started playing in the 4NCL for West is Best who I still play for."

7/6/2017 – This week's games are by Max Wahlund, a Swede who will be 45 on July 10th. Max used to be a journalist in Stockholm, but more recently he's lived both in a Buddhist monastery and a Christian community and is currently in Linköping, where he works as a publicity officer for the Church of Sweden. And when he moved to Linkoping, he took up chess again after a break of over twenty years. His two extensively analysed games are evaluate by an experienced GM. You can learn a lot from the notes.

6/27/2017 – This week's games are by Tanmay Srinath, who is sixteen and from Bangalore, India. A Taekwondo Black Belt, his is an international gold medalist, who has represented India at the highest level with distinction. Tanmay started playing chess at the age of 13 and has already played in four state championships and one national open. Jon Speelman evaluates his Agony and Ecstasy games.

6/16/2017 – This week's games come from Jim Guill who is 61 and retired in 2015. A USCF A grade player (i.e. between 1800 and 1999) he lives in Virginia and plays for the team Morphy's Mojo, which is entered in both the D.C. Chess League and the Northern Virginia (NVA) Chess League. He hangs out in local, Northern Va coffee shops, "where I sip tea, study chess and observe alien culture (i.e., the non-chess playing world) as it comes and goes and passes by."

5/31/2017 – This week's games are by Romain Bernard, a Belgian in his late twenties. Born in Liège in 1990 (the same year as Magnus, but a month earlier), he began playing chess while in the second year at university, studying physics and engineering. and since February of this year has worked for Prevor as a junior material engineer. Breaking somewhat from tradition, Romain sent three games instead of two, with the third being described as 'Irony'.

5/21/2017 – This week's single Agony game comes from Richard Bailey, an Englishman in his mid sixties. The British Boys Under 16 champion in 1968, he represented England at junior level in 1970 (Glorney Cup and Glasgow Junior International) and 1971 (Danish Junior Open). Richard sent in a game against Vernon Dilworth (1916-2004), the inventor of the famous Dilworth Variation of the Open Ruy Lopez. There is a lot to learn in this week's instructive column.

5/8/2017 – Fresh from the World Senior Team Championship, where he once more sat alongside mates Nigel Short and John Nunn, Jon Speelman takes a look at the two games sent by Andrew Medworth. Andrew is a software engineer working for Google and splits his time between London and Hong Kong. He enjoys chess, and sent detailed notes on his impressions and feelings during the game, now complemented with the grandmaster's expert eye.

4/28/2017 – After his request he has been receiving a steady trickle of games, and this time in his half-century column Jon Speelman looks at an Agony and an Ecstasy by Mike Healey, a 2360 player and "a total hacker", which is a big compliment coming from Jon. In the first game Mike's brain was "evidently totally sizzled," while in the second he pulled off a "beautiful finish to a splendidly violent game." Enjoy and learn.

4/19/2017 – The Agony and Ecstasy column offers readers a unique chance to have their games analysed by one of the greats, who was once world no.4, not to mention a prolific author. As if that weren’t enough, you get a free one-month Premium subscription to ChessBase Account. This month, Jonathan Speelman dissects one of his own recent painful losses, to share his Agony with you as well as what he learned.

4/9/2017 – This week’s pair of games are by Simon Knight, an Englishman who was born and brought up in England, but then married a Mexican and has lived there since 1994. Simon sent in two games from Gibraltar and the Mexican Open. His Agony game contains "one of my all-time worst nightmares turning a completely won position into a horrible loss and sending me out of contention for any possible prize." Jonathan Speelman dissects the submitted games.

4/2/2017 – Earl Roberts is a chess player who lives in Levin in New Zealand. He loves unorthodox openings and is a big fan of Alapin: "I have tried almost all of his theoretical creations – the ones that work , the ones that shouldn’t work and the ones that just don’t." Earl has submitted a remarkable Internet blitz game, his Agony, he played against Yasser Seirawan and an over-the-board Ecstasy against a strong countryman. Jonathan Speelman has provided comments on Earl's play.

3/23/2017 – Maik Naundorf, 36, from Germany, is a player who likes the artistic touch, and reading about the history of the game and biographies of chess players. In his games he prefers ECO-codes mainly in the A- or B-region. He submitted a game which cost him the chance to qualify for national championships, and the Extasy game was at the Dortmund Open, and allowed him to firmly cross the 2100 barrier. Jonathan Speelman has provided some good advice for Maik's play.

3/15/2017 – This week's column features two games submitted by Kanwal Bhatia, an academic in her thirties who has played a number of times in the England women's team. She explains that she learned chess on a container ship, where she first grew up. She now works in London as a researcher in machine learning for medical imaging.