6/25/2020 – Chess is fun and chess should be fun! But a lot of people do not have particularly fond memories of their first steps in chess. Andy Trattner knows how to teach beginners and he has a few ideas how to make chess fun from the very beginning. | Photos: Andrew Trattner

6/29/2018 – Magnus Carlsen weighs in on "peak performance" in a video published by Inc.com, and Play Magnus has launched a new app aimed at children five to nine years old called Magnus' Kingdom of Chess. The World Champion will play two tournaments plus the European Club Cup in the run-up to his title bout with Fabiano Caruana.

4/15/2018 – ChessBase recently reported on the new artificial intelligence program “AlphaZero” and its astoundingly steep learning curve for chess skill. Given just the rules of chess, in 24 hours of playing games only against itself, it improved to a superhuman level. Along the way, AlphaZero discovered and ultimately abandoned standard openings such as the French and Caro-Kann Defences. | Pictured: The learning curve projection for World Champion Magnus Carlsen overlayed on the actual rating trend.

11/18/2017 – Max Deutsch is an obsessive learner, a product builder, and guinea pig for a "Month to Master" project: the 24-year-old entrepreneur who lives in San Francisco has shown that he can train himself to memorize a deck of cards in two minutes, hold a 30-minutes conversation in Hebrew and develop perfect pitch, in each case after just 30 days of training. After eleven tasks he set himself for 2017 the twelfth was to beat World Champion Magnus Carlsen in a game of chess. The experiment, described in the Wall Street Journal, took place in Hamburg earlier this month. Tell us what you think.

12/20/2016 – While openings are unquestionably important, even a winning advantage can be squandered if the middlegame and endgame skills are lacking. There is no lack of top-notch courses to help you, ranging from beginner tactics to advanced strategic motifs, not to mention numerous exemplary works on the endgame. In this Buyer’s Guide you will find all you need on learning to play chess, mastering the middlegame, and converting the endgame.