Category: Lessons from the Masters

June 1, 2025 Matthew Sadler No comments exist

In my last blog post, we cast our minds into the nightmare of endgames future and saw some evidence that we need to play decisively as Black in the middlegame and not allow ourselves to drift into a passive situation. Just in case we still aren’t totally convinced, it’s also instructive to look at the…

May 18, 2025 Matthew Sadler 4 comments

While indulging myself in some analysis of games by the legendary Italian grandmaster Sergio Mariotti, I came across an extraordinary positional episode in some engine games I ran as part of my analysis. It’s one of those engine recommendations that make you question everything you thought you knew, as well as awakening feelings of guilt…

June 4, 2020 Matthew Sadler 4 comments

Idly flicking through one of the many Russian chess books I recently purchased from my friend Steve Giddins, my eye was caught by a diagram from a game by Peter Romanovsky. Peter Romanovsky was a strong Russian master and author especially active in the 1910s and 1920s. I had read his book “Soviet Middlegame Technique”…

May 29, 2020 Matthew Sadler No comments exist

The next stop for me through my tour of old books about forgotten players was the Latvian Grandmaster Aivars Gipslis (1937-2000) He is one of many names I had heard of without knowing anything concrete about them. He was ranked 19th in the world on the January and July 1971 lists with a rating of…