GM Monika Soćko turns the tables around

In my series of picking up Polish tournaments to tell people why they should learn some Polish for chess, I came across the Polish Women's Individual Chess Championship 2026. In this article, we will examine the first round game IM Oliwia Kiolbasa vs. GM Monika Soćko and look at some methods to dig deeper into language learning.

Round 1: From free fall to a win?!

Throughout the game, Oliwia Kiolbasa got a better and better position in the first round against Monika Soćko. For move 40, the engine says that White is already up 5 pawn units. For the first move after the time control hit, there was a very nice tactic waiting for Kiolbasa but she didn't use this opportunity for a huge advantage.

Fortunately for the grandmaster at the board, IM Kiolbasa used up 7 minutes of her time after the last move within the time control stress and still managed to not play the very useful tactic to win material! 41.Rf1!

After that move, the game stayed equalized until the second last move played: 60.Bg7???

Moving the bishop away was a bad idea as black has got a mating net now. With 60...Rd1, black threatens Rh1# (it's a mate in 10 still) and white gives up. This way, GM Monika Soćko started the tournament with one point! A rollercoaster of feelings!

Learning Polish with chess games?!

Let's assume we are sitting in the analysis area of the tournament. Monika Soćko and Oliwia Kiolbasa are talking about their game with each other and we don't understand a word. If we are lucky, they would use a board and we could see the moves but without a word we would be lost. Frustrating, right? But we've got an advantage: The coordinate system on a chess board does huge parts of the job in communication of chess analysis. We talk about moves by naming the piece and the square the piece is moving towards. To understand these bits of chess analysis in Polish, we've gotta learn the names of the pieces and the letters and numbers for the coordinate system.
Lucky us: Numbers and letters are always one of the first things you get taught when learning a language. In my own language classes (for Portuguese and Spanish), I use the game "Battleship" with its coordinate system to get my students to use letters and numbers in the beginning. We can do this for chess as well. You can begin naming the squares your pieces are going to while moving during a training game.

Numbers 1-8

The Polish letters A-H are actually very similar to the letter names in German.

Letters A-H

Piotr Wojsznis wrote for the language learning company Babbel, one of my former clients, a guide about the Polish alphabet with audio examples. This means we can already start combining numbers and letters.

Chess pieces in Polish

If you want to dig deeper into learning Polish and chess, feel free to think about how grammatical case can influence the names of squares within coordinate systems, for example. However, for the start let's just pretend grammatical case isn't needed for simply stating the name of one of those.

Are you ready to listen to the next game analysis in Polish?
It's your turn! Say the names of the moves within the IM Kiolbasa vs. GM Soćko game in Polish!