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” …

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 …

Quite a while ago, Steve Giddins gave me some photocopies of articles from old Russian magazines. They were game collections of Russian players, some known, some very obscure to the West. One of the players who fell into the latter category was the Ukrainian player Anatoly Bannik. Bannik won the Ukrainian Championship 5 times and …

Another Steve Giddins book I’ve been getting into is the Best Games collection of Russian Grandmaster Ratmir Kholmov (1925-2006). Best known in the West for convincingly beating Bobby Fischer at Havana 1965 on the Black side of a Ruy Lopez, Kholmov is one of many extremely strong Russian players who – for whatever reason – …