Through previous blog entries, we navigated our way towards the interesting possibility of 12.Ng4   Line 12.Ng4 In this blog entry we look at 12.Ng4 in more detail. We start by putting the f6-knight on the spot that was most annoying to White in the Conquest-Royal game: 12…Ne4 Line 12…Ne4 As Black, this feels very …

IIn previous blog entries, we discovered that Stuart’s 16.Nd4 Game: 16.Nd4 – while obviously a perfect practical choice in his crucial 8th round game at the British Championships – gave Black a number of opportunities to flatten out the play and drain the attacking life from White’s position by capturing on d4 at various moments. …

We saw in previous blog entries that Black’s best line on move 20 was to capture the knight on d4 with 20…Bxd4. Line: 20…Bxd4 In fact, an exchange on d4 could have been played at multiple occasions between move 16 (when White played 16.Nd4) and move 20: at what moments would this have been a …

Since 2018, most of the games of chess I’ve analysed seriously have been engine games. I’ve therefore developed a somewhat atypical frame of reference for recognising themes and patterns. I’m more likely to say “Oh I saw that in Alliestein-Komodo” than “Carlsen played like this against Aronian” And that turned out to be the case …

In previous blog posts we noted how important the idea of …f6 – driving away the white knight from e5 – was for Black, and how White tried to prevent it with moves such as 16.Nd4 Game: 16.Nd4 19.Qh3 Game: 19.Qh3 and 20.f5 Game: 20.f5 We saw of course that when 20…f6 finally arrived on …