Category: Lessons from the Masters

November 10, 2016 Matthew Sadler 3 comments

11th November 2016 is the 84th anniversary of the death of 6-times British Chess Champion Fred Dewhirst Yates. F.D. Yates was England’s strongest player from about 1913 (the year of his first British Championship victory) until his early death in 1932. An inveterate 1.e4 player, he was a dangerous attacker and also renowned for his…

November 4, 2016 Matthew Sadler No comments exist

One of the rewarding things about analysing the games of the old masters is that there is always plenty new to discover – not only in the games themselves but also in the annotations. That’s doubly true with Alekhine, strangely enough due to the excellence of Alekhine’s own annotations! Subsequent annotators have seemed intimidated by…

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…