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 – …

A few months ago, my friend and former coach Steve Giddins decided to sell the greater part of his fantastic chess book collection. My tiny flat is already creaking under the weight of the review copies I receive every month from New in Chess, but I purchased the maximum I could fit in! One excellent …

The last game in this series was a Marshall near-miss: the exciting game where Marshall was White against Lasker in New York 1924. The game featured an Exchange Slav – a favourite of Marshall’s (“A capture I have favoured throughout my career, and with very good results”) which was later taken up with great success …

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 …