New Chess Videos for October 26 – October 30
Monday, October 26
IM Bill Paschall
Capablanca-Lasker: 1921 World Championship Match Highlights – Part 5 | Opening, Strategy
Lasker, already trailing by three games, attempts to try one last time to win with White using 1. e4 and gains a slight advantage. Capablanca defends well, exchanging his worst piece and setting up a passive but defensible position. Perhaps tired , or just lacking confidence, Lasker finally blunders after a period of shuffling pieces and concedes the match. The losing Lasker saw no way forward with no victories in fourteen games, and Capablanca already halfway to the required eight wins. With this victory Capablanca retains the title he had already won by default and remains the richly deserved World Champion.
Tuesday, October 27
GM Eugene Perelshteyn – New American GM-Elect Hans Niemann crushes the Pirc! | Opening, Strategy, Endgame
In this game newly minted GM-elect Hans Niemann shows us his mastery of positional skills. He gets a comfortable edge in the Queen’s Indian and methodically weakens Black’s pawns. Notice how he quickly orients himself and changes plans based on the changing pawn structure. Black is fighting back with a timely pawn sac. But Niemann’s feel for initiative prevails when he realized he can give back the pawn with dividends: an unstoppable attack. Black panics, gives up his 2nd pawn and goes down into lost endgame. Impressive play by the youngster!
Wednesday, October 28
FM Dennis Monokroussos – Castling Into It | Openings
In many engine (computer chess) tournaments, the organizers force the programs to play certain opening variations. Sometimes those lines are in the mainstream, and sometimes they’re a little off the beaten track. The latter, understandably, tends to result in a higher percentage of decisive games. The game we’re about to look at features one of those deviations. It only comes on move 8, where Black rushes to castle kingside into what could turn out to be a serious attack. Thanks to Komodo’s brilliant play, it is all that and more! Black’s poor king is chased all the way to a8, and doesn’t find refuge there either, eventually dying near his birthplace, on d8. Enjoy a magnificent attacking masterpiece that anyone from Anderssen in the 19th century to Kasparov or anyone else today would have been proud to achieve.
Thursday, October 29
GM Nadya Kosintseva – Saving a Lost Game with Tactics! | Tactics, Strategy
In this lecture, I am going to show you my own game played back in 2004 in the Russian boys championship under 20. At that moment, I already stopped participating in girls tournaments and decided to test myself competing with boys of my age and older. The tournaments were very tough as every round I had to play against a male master or grandmaster. I was beaten much more often than in girls tournaments but these competitions helped me to grow up as a chess player and improved my chess skills significantly. The game that I analyze for you did not go well in the beginning and I could have lost in 20 moves. However, I was able to find a way to force my opponent into tactical complications and used my chance to make up for the strategic drawbacks of my position.
Friday, October 30
GM Robert Hungaski – Exploring Nimzo-Indian Doubled c-Pawn Structures, Part 2: The Leningrad Variation | Openings, Strategy, Middlegame
In this video I will be discussing the Leningrad Variation. This line was popularized by a group of players from the Russian city, particularly Spassky and his trainer, Vladimir Zak. This line will be one of the first attempts we will analyze in which White attempts to solve some of the problems that we encountered in the Saemisch Variation. In this line White is counting on the fact that it will be much harder for Black to put pressure on c4 since the black knight has been deprived of its natural c6-square (from where it usually heads to a5).