July 25, 2025
Matthew Sadler
5 comments
As I’m sure you all know, I’m constantly running engine matches on my cloud machines on all manner of chess topics. Occasionally, I come across a game of which I understand so little that it shocks me! This was the case with this Stockfish-Torch 15”+5’ game played about a week ago. 1. e4 e6 2….
June 20, 2025
Matthew Sadler
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Duolingo is something of a family addiction so I was very excited to see chess added to the Duolingo menu! One nice feature of the course is the ability to play a game against Duo, or rather Oscar to be precise! Even more thrillingly, you gain 50XP by doing so (even 150 XP during a…
June 1, 2025
Matthew Sadler
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In my last blog post, we cast our minds into the nightmare of endgames future and saw some evidence that we need to play decisively as Black in the middlegame and not allow ourselves to drift into a passive situation. Just in case we still aren’t totally convinced, it’s also instructive to look at the…
May 26, 2025
Matthew Sadler
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This blog post continues my slight obsession with the intricacies of the …c4 move in a Trompovsky / Torre Attack structure. This time we focus on one of the engine’s best lines for Black: 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 d5 3.Nd2 Nbd7 4.Ngf3 h6 5.Bh4 e6 6.e3 c5 7.Bd3 Be7 8.c3 0–0 9.0–0 and now instead of…
May 23, 2025
Matthew Sadler
2 comments
How much should you understand and how much should you know? It’s the eternal question of opening preparation! Ideally, you should understand everything and thus need to know nothing. Unfortunately, you need to know something before you can understand. So you first need to know, then understand, and then you should forget what you know…