Chess Magazines and Periodicals

I get a lot of people asking me about which chess books they should buy. Well, there are a lot of factors involved in choosing a good book for you, including the reason you want a book, your level of play, and your interests in the game. You can get a taste for a number of different styles of chess writing and presentation by buying a magazine, and there is usually a combination of tournament reports from up to date events, historical content, puzzles and instructional material from a combination of regular contributors and guest writers. After a year's subscription to a magazine, you should have a good idea of what books would be good to learn more detailed knowledge of the game.

American Chess Magazine, the best on the market!

The question is which magazine should one buy at the moment? Again, there are a number of factors involved in choosing which one to buy and as I've tried out quite a few over the years, I thought I'd write about my opinions. I will state that this is just my opinion which you can, of course, take with a pinch of salt.

There are 2 magazines on the market dealing with the international chess scene in an easy to read manner. These are New in Chess Magazine and American Chess Magazine. New in Chess has been the benchmark magazine for a number of years now, though I think it's heyday was in the 1990's when it was a truly fantastic publication. It seems to have become a bit lighter since then, which may or may not be a bad thing. I recently subscribed to American Chess Magazine, and it is my belief that this has taken the crown from New in Chess. American Chess Magazine has a distinctly American feel which means that a lot of coverage follows their top players. But when there are 3 American's in the top 10, this will mean detailed reports on the top tournaments of the day as well as some exclusive insider information about their top players. In the latest copy, there is a tournament report of the Candidates tournament by GM Jacob Aagaard which is absolutely excellent, as good as any tournament report I've ever read, with lots of interesting ideas from the games written in a clear instructional manner. American Chess Magazine is the publication I'd currently recommend to anyone who wants to find out more about chess.

There are regional magazines, and these are excellent and represent chess in one's region. I have subscribed to both the British Chess Magazine and Australia's 50 Moves Magazine which are both very good. They bring a feel of their own country to the magazine, though if I had any criticism of these publications, it would be that they are not quite regional enough, and I'd prefer more local content than a view of the chess world through the eyes of Australians or British players. Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in how Aussies are doing in International events and follow their progress, but I'm also interested in tournaments here in Australia, and I don' think a small round up of some local chess would harm the publication. The British Chess Magazine has recently joined with Informator group and this has rejuvenated the magazine. However, there is a share of material which I don't like. The other publication I've subscribed to is the Informator, which is excellent, though heavy going. This is serious stuff, and only for those who are serious about their chess work. It certainly doesn't have the chatty style of New in Chess or American Chess Magazine, though the content is awesome.

If you do take my recommendation and buy a magazine to dip your toe into the world of chess publications, I'd suggest getting a year's subscription. This will give you ongoing material at a cheaper rate, and you won't find yourself with a one off lower quality edition of a magazine, but you'll see it through an entire year to make up your mind. If I haven't plugged the American Chess Magazine enough already, the news this weekend that Editor in Chief will be chess journalist and photographer David Llada, a true chess devotee, should come as a big boost. Anyway, I'll try to post some content from the American Chess Magazine over the next couple of weeks!

Pawn Breaks

I've introduced this concept to some of my students recently. The good old pawn thrust into the breach has a number of functions. Firstly, and most importantly, it engages the enemy, and so brings the position into critical mode. Pawns breaks, especially unexpected ones in the centre, can be a great psychological blow as well, and it takes a very steady nerve to answer one that comes as a surprise. Secondly, it can open lines for pieces to come into play and attacks some space in the sector of the board where it occurs. Finally, the pawn break may undermine an enemy pawn structure or even initiate an attack.

Going back to my look at Informator 26, I've seen a number of interesting pawn advances in games. Here's my favourites from Informator 26:

Ok, for starters white has a promising position in the game Marjanovic-Forintos Kirovakan 1978 with 2 tempting pawn advances in the middle of the board. 18.e5! This pawn break comes with a big tactical threat: 19.Nxh7 with g6 a big weakness. The point of the move was both to engage the enemy and open lines for an attack on the b1-h7 diagonal. Black's position is critical and he felt he had to give an exchange by 18..Rf5 to stop the oncoming attack, but white just took it, regrouped, exchanged and won in technical fashion.

Here we have the great Victor Korchnoi playing black at the 1978 Olympiad against J. Diez del Corral from Spain. Always a fighter, Korchnoi advanced in the centre with 16..d5! Black feels that any opening of the centre will be good for him as that's where white's king is. He also had to calculate the line 17.exd5 Qxd5 18.Bxf6 gxf6 19.0-0 exd4 20.cxd4 Rfd8 when white is struggling to defend his d-pawn and other weaknesses around the board. So as well as threatening the opening of the centre, black equalises in the centre and protects his knight.

Here white was the famous attacking Grand Master, Velimirovic against GM Janosevic. It was black who first got a pawn break in. 16..d5. This is a typical move, trying to break the Maroczy style fortress that white has set up in the middle of the board. I'm not sure black was ready for the pawn break back again that came. 17.f5!. This move engages black's king side initiating attacking prospects, it challenges the pawn chain f7-e6-d5, attacks a knight, opens the c1-h6 diagonal and threatens to open the f-file. Black took 17..exf5 [17..d4 18.fxg6 dxe3 19.gxf7 gives white a massive attack] 18.Nxd5 fxe4 19.Nxe7+ Nxe7 20.Bf4 when white's pieces are incredibly active in compensation for his pawn deficit. Black managed to salvage his king side only to be overrun by white pawn's majority on the queen side.

And finally, the best till last. This was the deciding game in the 1978 World Championship match, with Karpov white against Korchnoi. It is a Modern/Pirc type position and Karpov won in fine style after the pawn break 25.e5! Like before, this engages black's structure, it challenges the pawn chain e7-d6-c5, attacks the knight on f6, opens the b1-h7 diagonal which is important in the line 25..Nfxd5 26.Nf5+!! gxf5 27.Qg5+ Kh8 28.Qxf5 when mate will happen on h7. The game continued 25..dxe5 26.Qxe5 Nxd5 27.Bxb5 Ra7

Karpov here played 28.Nh4! a fantastic move, which draws black's pieces to the king side as it appears as if a direct threat by white is not far away, starting with a knight sacrifice on f5. In fact while black's pieces were drawn to the king side, white won black's c-pawn and eventually advanced his connected passed pawns on the queen side to win, not unlike the strategic play in the previous example.

The moral of the story is keep on the lookout for pawn advances around the middle of the board. Funnily enough, even if they're not fully sound, they are unnerving moves which tend to take the initiative, which may be worth the investment of a pawn anyway (like in Velimirovic-Janosevic).

18

I know I'm getting boring, but that's how many days before I go on holiday to America! I can almost hear the call for me to go to the boarding gate. Only 18 days left. It's a great age to be, 18. I remember vividly going out on my 18th birthday with a couple of friends. We went to a pub so that I could legally have a drink and we were kicked out because the barmaid had gone to our school and thought we were underage. Ironic as we'd been drinking underage in that pub for over a year. Luckily, there's always another pub around the corner and I had my birthday pint or 2.

Is this what being 18 is all about?

At the age of 18 there are a whole set of rights that young people suddenly enjoy. Drinking alcohol, driving and voting are the ones that we normally associate with the age of 18. There probably isn't too much difference between what 18 year old's can do in UK and Australia. In both countries they can use weapons (gun licences in Australia, buy a crossbow in the UK), go to prison, enter legal contracts (eg buy a house, apply for a mortgage), make a will, serve on a jury or get a tattoo. Check this site out for the rights of 18 year old's (and younger ages too). In fact it looks like about the only things that 18 year old's can't legally do is adopt a child, supervise a learner driver, and drive a bus (for which you need to be older in order to have developed a miserable streak of cynicism so as to make passengers feel uncomfortable).

Tattoo's and Crossbows are allowed at 18 (source: rank my tattoos)

At 18 I wasn't even thinking of driving. In fact I never learned to drive until my 30's when I moved out of the city and found myself somewhat isolated without a car. At 18 I was pretty naive, and without any direction in my life. In fact, the only thing I really wanted to do was play chess. Unfortunately I wasn't good enough to do that full time. But all's well that end's well, and I eventually found myself in Australia where my love for the game has been rewarded with a full time chess coaching position with Chess Kids. Funnily enough, since I've started coaching I've become less interested in playing. I've given up international (FIDE rated) chess competitions because of the ever increasing bureaucracy that the governing body is imposing on national federations and organisers, which is basically making it harder to play in and run events, as well as making them  more costly. I had thought of throwing in the towel, coughing up the transfer fee of 250 Euros, and just getting on with it, but once again FIDE are attempting to introduce a player registration scheme (actually, they seem to have introduced it). This is a watered down version of the ludicrous registration proposal of earlier this year which caused me to turn my back on internationally rated chess in the first place.

Again I find it ironic that when I was 18 the thought of getting my name in the back of an Informator with a rating of 2200+ meant a great deal to me, and when I finally reached that goal about 7 or 8 years ago, it was like I achieved my goal. Since then my view of ratings has diminished and the FIDE rating which has dropped to 1000 level is not the thing it once was. And I think this is the main issue I have with the things FIDE are trying to introduce. FIDE are used to working for the top end of players, but they are imposing the same rules to players who have significantly different needs and desires. Widening the net to include a greater number of players to get FIDE ratings is ok, but there needs to be a widening of rules to accommodate these different strengths of players. Imposing the same registration and licensing rules for a player who might compete in one FIDE rated tournament a year (if that) with that of a professional players who plays hundreds of game each year is somewhat ridiculous.

The majority of my playing from now on will be online, probably at a site like chess.com where there are different types of chess available, articles and media resources, and different membership levels depending on how active a player wants to be. I will certainly not be an unlimited full member as I will not utilise the site this fully, but as soon as I get back from my trip to America (in 18 days time woohoo) I think I will sign up for a year.

Thursday Chess Observations

Is it my imagination or is the Informator not as good as it used to be? I remember getting a copy back in the 1980's, going through hundreds of games, loads of tactics and endgames, browsing positions throughout the book and basically getting loads from it. I can also remember someone saying that every good player should own at least 1 Informator, and with that 1 Informator and enough work, you could become a master. Well, maybe that was so, but hardly nowadays. I was looking through a recent Informator and the quality is still great, but the quantity is way down. The last Informator I read, back in the 80's had about 750 games in it, whereas the new edition has a little over 200. Now I know Informator has moved their production from 2 times per year to 4 times per year, but still that means the readers are only getting about half the amount of games we got in the past per year. There are some other nice features, but to be honest, I don't think Informator is really about Opening Labs or Player Profiles which are done much better by New in Chess and Chessbase. What made Informator stand out was the quantity and quality of their analysed games. Sad to say it isn't what it used to be :(

The latest Chess Informator

While we're on my imagination, I couldn't believe the size of the latest field for the Monday night MCC event. The recently concluded championship was a little down on numbers, but the first round of the City of Melbourne Open saw a very poor 20 people playing, while 4 others requested byes. I have to say that 24 for any MCC tournament is way below expectations ( the ANZAC Day Weekender tournament last week had a field of over 40 and the MCC has not been attracting huge weekend fileds over the past couple of years) and this is low enough for the committee to warrant having a look at things at the club. I will say that I've offered to help out when I can for the committee of the MCC again, but to be honest I have very little time, especially with trying to start another club on the other side of town. Anyway, while the field is small for the 2013 City of Melbourne Open, those playing in it I wish the very best of luck to. Top seed for the event is IM Mirko Rujevic and there was already a fairly big upset in round 1 when third seed FM David Hacche lost to Gary Bekker who is usually more noted for his skills as an arbiter than as a player. Gary does seem to have been putting some work into his game recently and his results have started to reflect this. I also guess that with such a small field for a 9-round swiss, the arbiter Kerry Stead will have some odd pairings to justify later in the tournament. I'm sure Kerry will be up to the task, as I know he takes these things very seriously and I hope he doesn't get a hard time from the players if some funny looking pairings come about.

1990 saw the 50th Informator produced

Ok, one last thing that I've been imagining this week. Is it my imagination or is the World Chess Championship not as prestigious as it used to be? I mean, the news all seems to be about the venue, Chennai in India. Magnus Carlsen's team have been expressing their concerns over the home venue for the champion, and the manner in which this venue was chosen. There is an excellent report on the chessvibes site. This came straight after an exciting Candidates tournament where at one stage Magnus Carlsen wasn't going to participate because of the nature of the qualification process to become a World Championship challenger. I remember a statement by Carlsen, or someone from his team, saying that it was more important for him to be number 1 in the World than World Champion. Perhaps as we become more and more interested in and governed by ratings, this will be the norm of the future. We have more rating periods than in the past (monthly compared to half yearly), we have FIDE ratings dropping to 1000 (I always wanted to get my rating to 2200 so as to get my name into the back of an Informator...another reason I don't think the Informator's are as good as they used to be!), and live ratings where we can follow the game by game rating changes for the top players. It is quite exciting, but are ratings becoming more important than titles?

Informator 14 covered the "Match of the Century", Spassky-Fischer 1972

And talking of the the World Championship, just what is the process...I mean how does one become champion nowadays? In the olden days of 750 game Informators, it was fairly simple. First you had to qualify from a zonal to an interzonal, and then proceed through a candidates event of either matches or a tournament. The World Championship cycle took 3 years to complete. I don't even know how long the cycles are supposed to take these days. In a couple of days time we have a zonal event happening in Oceania, in Fiji. Imagine (yes, I know I'm overusing this word somewhat today) that the winner of this zonal goes on to become world champion! What will they have to go through to do this, and how long will it take? I could look it up I suppose, but with the constantly shifting procedures and rules in FIDE I can't be bothered.

By the way, while I'm disappointed that Informators aren't as packed as they used to be, and while I'd like to see a regular and transparent World Championship cycle, I still enjoy Informators and will be eagerly following the unfolding saga of the World Championship. To me there is nothing bigger than a World Championship match, and seeing I share the same birth year as Informator and have grown up with it alongside me, I will not abandon it quite yet!