With the new year, I thought it was time to make some much-needed changes to Chess Strategies Blog.

It will take a few days to implement all the changes, so please be patient if something is missing or you don’t find everything you are looking for. I’ll be working on the site for the first week of January, so be sure to come back soon to see the completed site.

And I hope to be making more great material available during 2012 … new videos, new content on the blog, and maybe some other new stuff as well.

Plus, I’m working on a great new chess e-book specifically addressed to beginning and intermediate chess players. If you’re interested in being notified when the book is completed, just drop me an email at my contact page.

Thanks for your interest … and come back soon!

Just a little news item today. I was privileged to be able to publish an article as a guest author at mychessblog.com. The article is entitled “Endgame Lessons From Game Twelve of the 2010 Anand-Topalov Match.”

Check it out!

Here’s an item from newswise.com about a Texas Tech student, who is the world’s newest chess Grandmaster.

International Master Davorin Kuljasevic scored five wins and four draws at the 2010 Pula Open in Croatia to become the first Knight Raider to enter the elite ranks of the approximately 1,000 grandmasters worldwide.

The news item says that Kuljasevic is Coratian, and as I couldn’t find him listed on the “top” lists at uschess.org, he has likely played in the U.S. only very recently.

Nevertheless, it’s a great achievement for Kuljasevic, Texas Tech, and the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence.

I found a really nice free chess database online. It’s 365chess.com.

The site boasts a 3.5-million game database, which is regularly updated. It has several nice search functions The site has a very clean appearance and the interface works very well. Registration is free, though registration is required to search the database.

You can search the database by player names, by a particular board position, or using the opening explorer.

The one down-side is that you must be a “supporter” (i.e., pay for the service) in order to download games as pgn files. The up-side is that the service costs only $10.00 per year. Very inexpensive database!

Overall, the site is very nice and can allow you to do a lot of opening analysis for free.