Blog
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FIDE Rating: The Complete Guide
Do you have a FIDE rating? If not, you’re still a beginner in FIDE’s eyes — whether you’re 10 years…
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National Ratings
You can play a hundred over-the-board games and never once appear on FIDE’s rating list — so how do tournaments…
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Why Your Rating Is Different Everywhere
Why are chess ratings different across FIDE, a national federation, and an online platform, even for the exact same player?…
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How Chess Ratings Work (ELO)
This guide has chess Elo rating explained the way it should have been the first time: no maths degree required.…
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What a Chess Rating Is
What is your chess rating? It’s the question every chess player gets asked within the first thirty seconds of a…
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How to Read a Pairing Board
Learning how to read a pairing board is the first real skill every chess tournament newcomer needs, and almost nobody…
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Finding Your Chess Club: What Every Serious Player Knows
How to find a chess club worth joining starts with a more basic question: do you actually need one at…
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Chess Rules Etiquette: The Rules That Can Cost You a Game
Chess rules etiquette catches most new tournament players off guard. An 8-year-old from my delegation lost a game at a…
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Chess Fair Play: Cheating, Detection and What Gets You Expelled
Chess fair play is under real strain. My son came second in a tournament that another young man had won…
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Chess Notation Explained: How to Read and Write Any Chess Game
Chess notation is written into every opening line, every annotated grandmaster game, every engine analysis you will ever see. In…