Dvoretsky - For Friends & Colleagues, Volume 2

Pressure Play by Neil McDonald. Have you ever been tortured at the chessboard? If so, then you have probably been a victim of pressure play.

Elite players are brilliant exponents of pressure play. In situations where they have either a tiny advantage or no advantage at all they are highly adept at constantly setting problems for their unfortunate opponents. The position on the board may appear lifeless but they can probe and find plans and regroupings that will constantly ask their opponents difficult questions. These can be countered only by continual alert and accurate defence and we all know how difficult and wearing that can be.

The arch exponent of pressure play is world champion Magnus Carlsen. Carlsen is superb in this area of the game and consistently defeats world class opposition from simplified positions where he has no advantage whatsoever. How does he do it?

In this book, the highly experienced author and coach Neil McDonald analyses the finest examples of pressure play. In doing so he teases out the fundamental concepts that enable players like Carlsen to torture their opponents mercilessly.

• Paralyse the enemy pieces.

• Target the weakest squares on the board.

• Increase and exploit a space advantage.

Master pressure play and it will be your opponent on the rack, not you.  352 pages

Valeri Beim a, dans ses précédents ouvrages (on se souvient que l'un d'entre eux a été traduit en français) toujours fait preuve d'une louable ambition. Hélas, celle-ci s'est trouvée systématiquement contrecarrée par un étrange manque de rigueur : plans flous, absence de définition claire du public visé, choix d'exemples étrange, commentaires parfois incohérents... En un mot comme en cent, le GMI austro-russe est un bordélique - l'anti-Soltis, en quelque sorte. On pouvait espérer qu'en se limitant à un sujet étroit et très spécifique, ces défauts s'estomperaient largement. Eh bien, à première vue (on y regardera de plus près sous peu, promis), ce n'est guère le cas... L'ouvrage ne comporte en fait que deux parties : la première, simplement intitulée 'Tactics in Chess', semble destinée essentiellement à promouvoir la définition personnelle que l'auteur donne aux mots ''tactique'' ou ''combinaison''. Qu'il ait ou non raison sur le fond, l'ensemble me paraît relever du débat sur le sexe des anges - ou, si l'on préfère, des pratiques contre nature que des individus pervers s'obtinent à infliger à d'innocents diptères sans défense (quelques personnes s'étant plaintes du caractère parfois leste de nos textes, je préfère rester ici délicatement allusif). La deuxième partie est quand à elle titrée 'Technique du calcul des variantes', ce qui est alléchant. Malheureusement, on n'y parle absolument pas de calcul des variantes. On y parle en revanche de la recherche du coup juste, en particulier par le biais de l'enfant chéri de l'auteur : le raisonnement récursif ('inverse thinking') et sa conséquence logique, le 'coup résultant'. Même si le sujet n'est plus très neuf, c'est sans doute cette partie de l'ouvrage qui pourra présenter un intérêt - mais le joueur en quête d'un manuel sur le calcul aux échecs ferait vraiment mieux de lire The Inner Game of Chess... de Soltis, évidemment.

Do you play 1.d4, but feel discouraged by the seemingly limitless number of finely honed defensive systems available to Black? If you’re put off by the idea of having to learn massive amounts of theory just to reach a playable middlegame, then The Richter-Veresov Attack: Qd3 Variation might be just what you’re looking for.

Right away, you’ll be taking your opponents out of their preparation and into your comfort zone. While the Richter-Veresov has developed its own “book” over the years, Eric Fleischman shows you how to bypass a lot of that body of theory, too, with an early deployment of the queen to d3, an idea sometimes known as the Amazon Attack.

Covering a wide range of setups that Black could adopt in response (including French, Caro-Kann, Indian, Benoni, and Dutch formations), the author uses games by international players and examples from his own play to show how experience and a sense of the position count for more than memorized lines in The Richter-Veresov Attack: Qd3 Variation.  283 pages

OUT OF STOCK

In 1851, Horwitz & Kling published the first edition of the book. The collection of endgame studies was truly monumental, covering endgames of all types, often uncovering previously unknown truths about a variety of endgames, both simple and more complex ones.
After the passing of his colleague Kling, Horwitz started preparing a manuscript for a new, expanded edition. However, in 1885, he passed as well, and it was only through the effort of William Wayte that the second edition was published in 1889.
In this new edition, all of their compositions and analysis have been thoroughly reanalyzed by FIDE Master Carsten Hansen. 182 pages