Van Delft - Mastering Positional Sacrifices

Rudolf Spielmann was one of the strongest chess players in the world in the first half of the 20th century. Following his shared second place at the Carlsbad tournament in 1929 with Capablanca, half a point behind Nimzowitsch, he was considered one of the world's top five. His career spread over four decades and included a host of tournament and match victories, such as defeating Bogoljubov over ten games in 1932.

Often known as the Last Romantic in chess with his predilection for the King's Gambit and Vienna Game and love of sacrifices, he bequeathed a rich legacy of ideas and techniques. These combinational and positional master classes are examined here in 213 instructional games and fragments, organized thematically in a way similar to Grigory Bogdanovich's previous volumes on Bogoljubov.

Detailed commentary is provided on games against leading contemporaries. Opponents in this work include five world champions Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe, and Botvinnik, as well as Marshall, Janowski, Tarrasch, Tartakower, Nimzowitsch, Reti, Rubinstein, Romanovsky, Bogoljubov, and many others. Bogdanovich's commentary is richly supplemented by that of stars of the epoch and, above all, of Spielmann himself.

The book further contains a biographical sketch and is supplemented by a large number of tournament photographs and portraits. Spielmann's life was ultimately tragic - a lonely death in Sweden aged just 59 as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany following the demise three years earlier of his sponsor, while several family members failed to escape the Holocaust.

Additional materials in the book include a detailed table of tournaments and matches from his career, as well as a translation of Spielmann's fascinating article dating to 1923 called "From the Sickbed of the King's Gambit". 460 pages

Books on how to improve your results over the board have been written before but in these changing times when chess has propelled onto the public consciousness, an update is badly needed. Grandmaster Daniel Gormally uses his 25+ years of experience to take the readers through the fires of the tournament cauldron, while illustrating some of his battles with the best players in England.
Along the way he tackles how to approach online play, an increasingly important issue as this form of chess has increased in popularity. Do you need a coach ? Will streamers relly help you to improve ? And should you turn off your computer ? Gormally emphasizes the importance of independent analysis in enabling the player to make progress and explains how he himself suffered in his results due to an over-reliance in chess engines.
And then there is the nitty gritty of tournament play itself. Gormally grapples with subjects that aren't covered in normal tournament books, from what hotels you should choose, to what kind of diet you need to follow, while also concluding that he lacks the awesome physical fitness of the Norwegian chess god Magnus Carlsen.
It all culminates in an explosive Hastings diary, where the author uses his acerbic wit to pull apart the vagaries of preparing for international competition in an account that verges on comic-tragic. 348 pages

Processeur Pentium à 300Mhz ou +
64MB RAM
Windows XP, Windows VISTA, Windows 7
Lecteur de DVD, souris, carte son

Système requis : PC Windows XP (SP3), Vista or Windows 7, Windows Media Player, DVD-drive

Most chess openings have been around for centuries; the first book on the Ruy Lopez was written in 1561. Not so the Jobava System. This is a thoroughly modern opening that has only achieved prominence in the last decade or so. It is named after the Georgian chess visionary Baadur Jobava, a highly imaginative and creative grandmaster. The Jobava System is based around the opening moves 1 d4 d5 2 Nc3 Nf6 3 Bf4. For many years this was considered to be a quiet and unassuming backwater of chess theory. No longer!

Thanks to the efforts of Jobava and others this system has been honed into a fierce attacking weapon. As this opening is so new the correct defensive methods are not well understood. This makes the system extremely dynamic and dangerous.

In this book, Simon Williams (the Ginger GM) delves deep into the Jobava and offers up a complete repertoire based on this exciting new system. The advantages are clear:

– There is very little existing theory

– Black cannot play safely on “auto-pilot”

– It is fresh and it’s fun!

L’anti-Sicilienne numéro 1 par un de ses fervents supporters.