Month: October 2016

October 28, 2016 Matthew Sadler 4 comments

While flicking through Alekhine’s collection of his Best Games, I came across this game against Euwe from the latter part of the 1937 World Championship Match. After an early exchange of queens, Alekhine won a pawn fairly quickly and I was intrigued to know where Euwe had gone wrong. As always, there were a couple…

October 21, 2016 Matthew Sadler No comments exist

In 1927, Bogolyubow beat Reti twice from the same opening: 1.Nf3 d5 2.c4 e6 3.d4 Nf6 4.Nc3 Nbd7 5.e3. The first game was a sharp fight in an IQP structure; the second was an instructive example of the fight against hanging pawns. In a previous article – https://matthewsadler.me.uk/the-middlegame/hanging-out-with-efim/ – we saw Bogolyubow in trouble while…

October 13, 2016 Matthew Sadler 2 comments

It never ceases to amaze me how many complicated games Alekhine played in his career. While browsing through collections of his games, I’m constantly coming across positions where my first instinct is “That can’t possibly work… can it?” In this post we take a look at a couple of Alekhine tactical tidbits that I analysed…

October 13, 2016 Matthew Sadler No comments exist

Both Natasha and I were delighted to hear that our book “Chess for Life” has won the English Chess Federation 2016 Book of the Year competition. A couple of extracts from the official press release: This year the judges had to make a choice from four books of high quality in the Short List, but…

October 6, 2016 Matthew Sadler 2 comments

Watching Mihai’s Marin analysis of Karpov’s middlegame skills on a recent Chessbase DVD has been a wonderful learning experience. Marin identified a facet of Karpov’s play that I had never noticed before: moving the same piece many times in succession. After this manoeuvre, no one knows why, but he’s better! Marin cites many examples. This…