Monday, April 14 IM Valeri Lilov – Attacking a Weakness by Steinitz (strategy, middlegame) Exploiting a weakness has always been problematic for many chess players. While it’s not too challenging to spot a weakness (pawn, king, etc.), many players don’t know the correct approach to exploiting it.. The first world champion Wilhelm Steinitz was the one who first discovered the best way to exploit weaknesses in a positional manner.
Tuesday, April 15 GM Eugene Perelshteyn – Building up Positional Pluses to Outplay a Strong GM (middlegame, strategy) In this GM vs GM battle White builds up small positional pluses to get an open file. Domination on the open file results in winning a pawn, but things are not so simple as White still needs to demonstrate good technique to convert. Watch out for instructive king play in the endgame!
Wednesday, April 16 FM Dennis Monokroussos – Queen’s Gambit and Friends, Part 6: Handling the Minority Attack (opening, tactics) In our last video we saw how effective the minority attack could be. Could be – but isn’t always. Here we see Predrag Nikolic attempt to use it against Vladimir Kramnik, but the seemingly small differences between the position they reach when White went for the b2-b4 advance and what we saw in the Ruban-Panchenko game made all the difference in the world. In that game, Black suffered and lost a long game; this time, White was crushed pretty quickly. Master the differences and you can play either side of this plan!
Thursday, April 17 IM Bill Paschall – Aronian Gets Tactical (opening, tactics) Aronian goes back to the 90’s with the Modern Exchange variation against Svidler’s Grunfeld. Black goes into the pawn grab variation with Qxa2 but forgets that f7 can become weak ! We see a classic Bxf7 sacrifice after Svidler is baited into moving his f8 rook. The game could perhaps be salvaged by a computer but technically very difficult and Svidler succumbs.
Friday, April 18 GM Bryan Smith (middlegame, strategy) – The Best of Lone Pine 1979, Part 4 In the fourth part of his series on the 1979 Lone Pine tournament, GM Bryan Smith looks at an important encounter from the seventh round, Larsen – Lein. In this game Bent Larsen manages to carry out a sparkling but rather unclear attack against Anatoly Lein’s Dragon.