Welcome to Mike Serovey on Chess!

The theme of this site is chess and the main focus of this site is analysis of the games of Mike Serovey (that's me), with diagrams. Most of the stuff that I cover is pretty basic and includes general theory as well as specific analysis of certain positions and move orders.

This is one of my personal hobby sites. The games will be from 1983 on and one game is from 1976. I will be adding more games from the 1970's as I find them. Some of these games are good examples of how not to play chess.

What's in this site for YOU? If you are a master then you probably won't find much here other than chess blogs and links to other great sites. Use this site as a portal to other great chess sites. If you are a beginner you will find tips on general strategy and links to chess books that will help you improve your game. If you are an intermediate player you will find ideas on how to handle certain openings and types of positions. YOU may not agree with some of my analysis and that is OK with me. If YOU wish to send me analysis to include on this site YOU may certainly do so be sending an email to me at

I got to thinking about something recently and decided to post it here. If you were to look up my current USCF over-the-board (OTB) rating you will see that I'm only rated 1500. My latest USCF correspondence rating is 1893. So, I'm clearly not a master at chess! When I joined the US Army back in 1977 I wasn't taught how to be a soldier by a general or senior NCO. I was taught by one buck sergeant (E-5) and a bunch of staff sergeants (E-6). I rarely saw the company commander or first sergeant. Mid-level NCOs could teach me how to be a soldier, to include how to march, shoot a rifle, polish my boots, make my bunk, etc. When I got to AIT (Advanced Individual Training) it was again mid-level NCOs that taught me how to read a map and compute fire data for canons.  My point here is that chess beginners and chess novices do not need a chess master, and certainly not a chess GM, to teach them the rules of the game and some basic strategy. They can learn from someone at my level. Someone who is already at my level needs to learn from a chess master or above.

Another thing to consider is this, practice against someone whose chess rating is about 200 points above where you are rated. If you go too much above that you will lose every chess game and become discouraged. If you go much below that level you will not learn anything new. Easy wins at chess may be fun for a while, but improvement comes with studying chess and practicing chess against better players than where you are currently rated.

I somehow got signed up for Google Alerts (I don't remember how) and I got an alert recently that told me about this site being indexed by Alexa. I have added a screenshot of Alexa that shows that this  site is now ranked in the top 10 chess sites at Alexa for the "People" category. Click this link to see my site on Alexa. For best viewing you may have to save the bitmap to your hard drive and then use Windows Explorer (or equivalent) to enlarge the picture and then scroll to the lower right corner to see this site listed as number 9.

If you find the content of this site useful please help me cover the costs of keeping this site on the web by making a donation. Any amount would be helpful Thanks!

If you want to be notified whenever I make updates to this site then get my new Chess Site Notifier. It lets you know when I update this site without you having to give me your email address. Get the Chess Site Notifier by clicking here. You need to save this application to your desktop and then click on it whenever you want to check this site for updates.

What's New?

January 3, 2009 - I have added my win against OscarNorm. This was played at Stan's Net Chess.

March 5. 2009 - I have added my win against Comet. This game was played at Stan's Net Chess.

June 15, 2009 - I have added my win against Sean McKinney, AKA  az2112.

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