Dutch National Chess Championship

The Dutch Championship started today, in Boxtel, for both women and men. Until 5th of July, in a round-robin system, 10 players in the men section and 6 in the women lot will fight for the title.

Close-up: Wesley So!

I didn't have the chance to meet Wesley personally, not until January this year, in the Tata Steel Chess Tournament. All I knew about him was his ascending chess career - a wonder kid from the Philippenes, with an incredible talent for chess. His achievements at an early age, coming from a country without a very long chess tradition, made him famous worldwide.

Che Guevara and chess

If you have to use the public transportation, no matter which country you are, I suppose you all experience the same boredom as me, until you reach the final destination. To cope with that, I usually take a small book in my handbag. This time I ran out of chess books, I have to find some smaller ones, to fit my bag:) So I took a compressed Che Guevara biography, which reminded me what I've heard before: that one of his passions was...chess!
Interested by the subject, I used a bit our modern friend - internet - and I came up with the following information:

Tata Steel Chess - "Schach" magazine's article

Latest issue

This is my first article which I wrote for the well known German magazine "Schach". It was about struggle, pain and hapiness - high class chess in Wijk aan Zee. It has been a while since it was published in February this year, but I hope you'll still enojy it, in case you haven't read it in the original form.


"Every year, long time before the month of January comes and long time after it’s gone, chess lovers all over the world have one favorite subject to discuss: Wijk aan Zee and its famous tournament.

How to be a champion in chess and life

Do you ever get that feeling deep down that you should be able to accomplish much more than you are at present? 

1. Turn your ability into achievement:

Discipline is what turns your ability into achievement. Without it, your goals will always be daydreams at best. Working out two days last week, five days this week, and three days next week will prevent you from ever reaching your podium.

TV Chess

I have recently discovered a brilliant TV Chess series from the 80's, which was aired by the BBC, absolutely wonderful! You can actually listen the players comments, how were they thinking, you can follow the game of course and go back in time, watching a very good quality chess video. Enjoy! 



I will come back with new videos in the future, if I will particularly like one of them. This time I attached the game played between Nigel Short and Tony Miles; if you are interested, you can see all videos from the BBC chess series on this youtube channel.
Good luck in your pursuit of chess excellence!

Romanian Rapid Cup

Quite often we travel day and night, for hours and hours, to reach a beautiful place, to see with our own eyes a new country, to meet new people...the more difficult it gets, the higher the pleasure we experience:) Might sound a bit strange, but psychologically speaking, it's completely normal. What we achieve easily, doesn't bring us an incredible amount of joy; instead, if we have to fight, to sweat, to spend a lot of money, than we might come somewhere, our pride will be satisfied that no matter how big the barriers were, we managed!


I have been travelling thanks to chess since I was 6, but somehow, I never really took time to explore my own country. I have always said and knew that Romania is an incredibly beautiful place, after all, it's my home! Subcounsciously though, my brain was undermining the idea of going for a holiday in Romania, I can travel around here basically at any time, so why should I do it now?!
Luckily, last weekend I played, together with my husband, the Romanian rapid team cup, which took place in Brasov.