For any author it’s a wonderful moment to see a new book published, and that happened to me a week ago with the launch of “The Silicon Road to Chess Improvement” (New in Chess). The book explains many new and original ways to use engines for training, and distills opening and middlegame strategies from the greatest and most spectacular engine games played in recent years.
Category: The Middlegame
Leela Zero committed a severe blunder in its TCEC match against Stockfish. GM Matthew Sadler analyses why this happened.
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…
Continuing my journey through books from Steve Giddins’ collection, I came across a volume of Russian Grandmaster Alexander Zaitsev’s best games. If you know your Karpov games, then his name may ring a bell as he was the Black player in this astonishing position after 18 moves at the 1970 Russian Championship, a game Karpov…
One intriguing thing during the match was how much Lasker varied his repertory as Black against 1.d4. The 3 games he played with his own Lasker variation in the Queen’s Gambit Declined (1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bg5 Be7 5.e3 Ne4) netted him 2.5 points out of 3 games and some pretty good positions…