Although I love analysing attacks and crunching out reams of variations, it’s often just as useful to reflect quietly on the general course that a game has taken. The aim then is not to discover the whole truth about the position, but rather to get into the heads of the players and to understand the …

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 …