I would like to start this series of articles by examining attacks by Yates taken from his Best Games collection. Though none of them is perfect, they are a good illustration of Yates’ attacking flair.   The first game was played against Isidor Gunsberg at the 1914 British Championship at Chester and featured an attack …

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 …

We restarted our “Chess for Life” promotion tour on November 3rd at Ealing Chess Club.   After a brief introduction by Matthew, Natasha started the ball rolling with a quick multimedia-enhanced tour of “Chess for Life”!   After that, it was into the chess. The theme for the evening was “Learning from practice” and each …

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 …

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 …