I’ve recently been going through Alekhine’s Collection of Best Games (in the Kindle edition otherwise known as the world’s most complete collection of chess misprints) and stopping whenever a game grabs my attention. I got caught up for a few days by the game Alekhine-Isakov played in 1919, It features a very interesting attack in …

At the recent 4NCL weekend, I played 2 attacking games which was a welcome change from the long grinds I’ve been playing in the past 6 months. This may be related to the Alekhine games I’ve been studying recently! Unfortunately, in my game against Ravi Haria, my attacking play wasn’t quite up to Alekhine’s standard. …

In the bar on the Saturday evening of the recent 4NCL weekend, I teamed up with my Chess for Life co-author WIM Natasha Regan against FM Jonathan Rogers and GM Matthew Turner for a no-holds-barred match of “hand and brain”. It’s a lovely chess variant for pairs in which one player is the “hand” and …

When I retired from professional chess, one of the things I was looking forward to was playing for fun. Without the pressure of having to maintain my ELO rating, I was looking forward to playing attractively and creatively, and I was hoping I’d react calmly when the inevitable losses came along. That never quite happened …