It never ceases to amaze me how many complicated games Alekhine played in his career. While browsing through collections of his games, I’m constantly coming across positions where my first instinct is “That can’t possibly work… can it?” In this post we take a look at a couple of Alekhine tactical tidbits that I analysed …

Both Natasha and I were delighted to hear that our book “Chess for Life” has won the English Chess Federation 2016 Book of the Year competition. A couple of extracts from the official press release: This year the judges had to make a choice from four books of high quality in the Short List, but …

Watching Mihai’s Marin analysis of Karpov’s middlegame skills on a recent Chessbase DVD has been a wonderful learning experience. Marin identified a facet of Karpov’s play that I had never noticed before: moving the same piece many times in succession. After this manoeuvre, no one knows why, but he’s better! Marin cites many examples. This …

I was saddened to hear last week that the great Russian trainer Mark Dvoretsky had died at the age of 68. As a tribute, I wanted to share my experiences of studying with Mark in the mid-90’s. I got the opportunity to do so while my friend (and former coach) Steve Giddins was working in …

In 1932, Bogoljubov and Spielmann played a 10-game match in Semmering, Austria which Spielmann edged 5,5-4,5. In his biography of Bogoljubov, Soloviov is dismissive of the match, stating “…after [Bogoljubov] won the first two games, he failed to press home a huge advantage in the third game and then he blundered a piece in game 4. …