One of my favourite pieces of chess literature is the short 1964 article by Robert J Fischer entitled “The 10 greatest masters in history” which Edward Winter has made available on his excellent Chess History site (http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/fischer4.html) The first time I read it, I dismissed Fischer’s views as eccentric, but the more I learn, the …

Another famous Alekhine attack is his game against the 66-year old former World Champion Emanuel Lasker at Zurich 1934. I found some interesting lines while analysing, but what struck me the most was that I twice underestimated a variation involving the sacrifice of the queen for rook, bishop and pawn. After checking my analysis with …

The latest stop on the “Chess for Life” promotion tour was the BPB Limburg Open in Maastricht on Saturday 14th May. It’s the second biggest tournament in Holland in terms of numbers of participants and the top section boasted 6 players above 2600.     Between the 2nd and 3rd rounds, we talked about 3 …

In our “Chess for Life” chapter on Tony Miles, we looked at an original opening plan of Tony’s in which he released the central tension very early with …c5-c4 in one of his patented offbeat openings. Although we discussed this decision at reasonable length in the book, we couldn’t include all the material we’d gathered …

Yesterday, Natasha and I kicked off the “Chess for Life” promotion tour with an evening lecture at the Richmond and Twickenham Chess Club. We started off proceedings with a theme from Capablanca’s games – “Linked Knights” – and then showed how Capablanca’s arch-rival Alekhine made use of a turbo-charged version of the same theme to …