Casse-tête Keyring **

Voici l'oiseau rare, un jeu accessible aux très jeunes enfants mais auquel les adultes peuvent jouer sans s'ennuyer. Des poulets courent en rond en essayant de s'arracher mutuellement des plumes. Pour ce faire, il faut d'abord se placer derrière l'adversaire puis le dépasser. La grande astuce, c'est que les déplacements ne s'effectuent pas à l'aide de dés, mais via un système inspiré du célèbre Memory (des tuiles retournées portent des symboles identiques aux cases de la piste, et il faut les retrouver pour avancer). Ajoutons que les retournements de situation sont permanents et qu'aucun joueur n'est sûr de gagner, ni surtout de perdre, jusqu'au dernier instant...

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!

The English Opening is very popular nowadays, but 1.c4 e5! is a serious challenge and not to everyone's taste. Here comes 1.Nf3, with the idea to transfer the game into the English with c2-c4 to follow. The only hurdle on that path is 1...d5. Then White is at a crossroads. 2.c4 allows 2...d4 3.b4, while 2.e3 is an attempt to deny ...d4. Black can revive the threat with 2...c5, and again, White has a choice. 3.c4 d4 4.b4! leads to the Blumenfeld with reversed colours. Or he can continue to fight against ...d4 with 3.b3. White's decisions on the second and third move depends on the way he wants to meet the Queen's Gambit and the Slav/Meran/Chebanenko. Semkov covers in detail the different options, and also devotes several chapters on 1.Nf3 d5 2.e3 Nf6 3.c4 c6 and 3...e6 4.b3! (avoiding the innocuous version of the QGA after 4.Nc3 dxc4). There is another chapter on 1.Nf3 d5 2.e3 Nf6 3.c4 dxc4, where the absence of Nc3 allows White to get some pressure by refraining from d2-d4. 244 pages

Are you a parent of a junior chess player who feels that because you don’t know how to play chess, you can’t help your child? Or are you an adult or junior chess player who has taken private chess lessons for years, but feels you haven’t been progressing?

In both cases, there can be a lot of reliance on a chess coach who has been given free rein with lesson content and direction. They probably have some sort of plan but it is likely to be a plan used for all their students. This is not ideal. More important is a well-thought out, individualized plan, that focuses on a specific player’s unique strengths and weaknesses. Formulating such a plan is crucial for making improvements.

Victoria Doknjas and her son John Doknjas are an ideal writing partnership to tackle this topic. John is a FIDE Master who has already established himself as an excellent and highly-respected author who understands the improvement process very well. Victoria has over a decade of experience navigating the competitive chess arena with her three master-level sons, including also running her own chess academy. Together they offer a unique and informative insight to those wanting to get more out of their chess studies, as well as presenting practical advice in areas including:

- Identifying important goals and how to work towards them.
- Understanding how to objectively analyse your games.
- Maximising the efficiency of software and engines for learning.

Reading this book can broaden your horizons in the essential areas of chess study, and ideally let you better evaluate what your chess coach is teaching you. And if you don’t have a chess coach, this book will provide you with an excellent foundation for serious chess study.

384 pages

The Russian Boris Spassky was the perfect gentleman. He was a chess genius who became World Champion in 1969. But he was also gracious in defeat after he lost his title to the American Bobby Fischer in 1972 in the Match of the Century. This biography includes fifty of Spassky’s best games, annotated by former Russian champion Alexey Bezgodov, and a biographical sketch of a few dozen pages, written by Dmitry Aleynikov, the Director of the Chess Museum in Moscow. Spassky was born in St. Petersburg in 1937; he moved to France in 1976 and returned to Russia in 2010. On his road to the World Championship, he defeated all his contemporaries convincingly in matches, including Paul Keres, Efim Geller, Mikhail Tal, Bent Larsen and Viktor Korchnoi. He lost his first match for the ultimate title against Tigran Petrosian but won in his second attempt in 1969. With his all-round style, fighting spirit and psychological insights, he could beat anybody anytime and, for example, won at least two games versus six other World Champions: Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Fischer, Karpov and Kasparov. 279 pages