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From Rags to Riches Louis Lima ChessBase Magazine #132, (DVD), Edited by Rainer Knaak, 2009 ChessBase, $26.95 (ChessCafe Price: $23.95) The last ChessBase Magazine I owned was back in 2003 when I was temporarily receiving them as part of my ChessBase Mega Database purchase. They surely have come a long way since. These days one gets approximately three Gigabytes of high-quality content, and the twenty-four page booklet has a sophisticated design worthy of standing next to other chess books in my bookshelf.
The CBM format is extremely user friendly and you can easily find yourself clicking around and discovering things on your own. Still, if you have never purchased a CBM before, I would recommend checking out the excellent video links at the end of the 132! Start page (Text Tab). GM Karsten Müller’s disarming charm and humor on these video clips will make you feel welcome, and you will learn how to navigate through the content to make the most of CBM 132.
The introductory videos are presented by Müller and GM Rogozenco. Müller gets us started with some critical moments in the recent Biel 2009, pausing to let readers take a crack at finding the solutions, and encouraging us to take our time. He then proceeds with an overview of the magazine contents. Once Rogozenco starts showing us some rag-to-riches moments in recent tournament play, there is no looking back and we are totally hooked on CBM 132. For instance, in the game Movesessian-Ponomariov we get the following position:
Rogozenco points out here that the most important factor is the vulnerable position of Black’s king and White intends Qe6. However, he needs to first play 39.a3 in order to provide an escape square from the coming queen checks. Instead, Movsessian played 39.Qe6 straightaway only to find himself on the losing end after 39…Qf1+ 40. Kb2 Ba3+! 41.Kxa3 Qc1+. Rogozenco notes that this situation is very typical in today’s modern tournament chess. He calls it the “thematic change of situation over-the-board in a single move.” Personally, I am just relieved to see that not only patzers like me spiral into defeat from a single blunder. There are fourteen main sections in CBM 132, which you enter by clicking on the links in the left-hand vertical column. There is something here for everyone, every taste, and every learning methodology. You will find deeply annotated games, video lectures, move-by-move learning, tactical training, and much more. Most of the content in these sections are related to recent tournament events, giving you an inside look into today’s professional chess scene. Let’s explore these sections briefly. Biel 2009, FIDE GP Jermuk 2009, Grand Slam Final Bilbao, and Recent Tournaments These four links contain the most recent tournaments played between mid-July and mid-September of this year. For instance, the Biel 2009 GM tournament was won by Frenchman Vachier LaGrave in a pool of GMs that included Morozevich, Ivanchuk, Alekseev, Gelfand, and Caruana. The featured games are embedded in the links on each tournament page, and they are heavily annotated with written commentary and variations, making the content versatile to various audience levels. You can also access all the games of the tournament by clicking on the “game” tab.
You can enlarge the font size if you find yourself squinting to see the annotations. This can be done by going to Menu-Tools-Options. Once in Options click on the “Font” button and you now can adjust the font type and size. Don’t leave without at least scrolling through the annotated games in these five tournament links! There are so many educational moments. In the game Fabiano-Ivanchuk from the eighth round the moves went 1.d4 d6 2.e4 Nf6 3.Nc3 g6 4.Be3 Bg7 5.Qd2 c6 6.Bh6 Bxh6 7.Qxh6 Qa5 8.Bd3 c5 9.Nge2 Nc6!? 11.Bb5+ How many club-level players would even think of playing Ivanchuk’s 11…Kd8! here?
Openings The first thing you see when you open this section is a synopsis of each opening survey and a link to access its contents. Each survey’s main page has plenty of written commentary and diagrams so that it is unnecessary to set up the position over a real chess board. The page will also contain the links to deeply annotated games on each particular line, which you can read by scrolling through the large chess diagram.
There are a total of twelve opening surveys:
Endgames GM Müller, the current endgame authority in the Fritz Trainer platform, discusses seven endgames from recent tournament play. These video lectures include themes such as opposite-colored bishops, the “correct” exchange, and zugzwang in rook endgames. Müller moves fast through these examples, but the positions are educational. You can stop the video clips at your discretion and analyze the position on your own, or guess the next move.
Fritztrainer Here we get five lectures by GM Leonid Kritz covering the Slav with 4…a6, Scandinavian main line and sidelines, and two games from recent events: Kriz-Below (Biel 2009) and Naiditsch-Kramnik (Dortmund 2009). GM Ftacnik thinks he’s found an idea in the Yugoslav attack to punish you for playing the Sicilian Defense, and GM Mikhalchishin will discuss the Volga Gambit. These are tidbits from Fritz Trainers, but they give you an opportunity to evaluate the presenter’s styles and content if you are interested in purchasing the complete DVD.
Move by Move The “King” of the Fritz Trainer platform, GM Daniel King, will get you to train like your in a real game by finding the next move in the Socko-Krasenkow encounter from the Najdorf Memorial event. My only complaint in this review is that I wished they gave us more of these! Solitaire Chess is one of my favorite training methods, and perhaps you can empathize with me as to how annoying it is to accidentally see the next move when doing these out of a printed books or magazines. Nothing like that happens here unless you specifically click the solution button. I think a Fritz Trainer focusing on this simulation technique would be widely welcomed by chess fans.
Strategy This section follows the same format as the opening surveys, with Peter Wells presenting part II of “There is the Tension in the Center”. He orients us on the old dilemma of when to maintain or resolve the tension in the center, and discusses related issues such as the impact of c7-c6, the art of extracting positional concessions from the tension, and bringing dynamic factors in the position. Each of these themes is introduced and one or two games are used as examples. The annotation styles of these games differ from slight to heavily annotated. The Onischuk-Irzhanov game from Luzern 1997, for instance, has no variations but lots of commentary. Again, this is a great way to have a little bit for every chess-level.
The content was interesting, but the text appears visually truncated. It just looks like one huge paragraph from top to bottom. The paragraphs need more spacing and to be divided into more readable chunks. Given the stylish and clean design of CBM 132, this page stuck out like a sore thumb. The Opening Trap What would a magazine be without an opening trap? We’ve all come to expect them. CBM gives us only one, an entertaining trap from Sharp-Soltis, Bermuda 2002. I think this section should titled “Opening Traps” and include more entertaining examples like the one shown by Knaak here.
Tactics This superb feature puts you in the driver’s seat of many tactical shots made in recent tournament play. You can even boast at finding the moves faster than the GM, as in some cases you are only allowed a minute to find the answer. All the tactics come from a total thirty-two games. If this is your first CBM, I would highly recommend that you look at the elementary video titled “05 training questions” so that you learn how to use this function properly. ICCF Telechess This section contains games from various correspondence tournaments. It seems that the games come without any annotations, but the databases have research value in themselves. There are also links to iccf-webchess.com that are supposed to allow you to observe ongoing games in the current World Championship Finals, but the links did not take me anywhere, and there are no instructions in this regard. New Products You’ll find Fritz Trainer descriptions and video samples of Davies’s The Queen’s Gambit Declined Exchange Variation, Weteschnik’s Takiikmotive Erkennen!, and King’s Powerplay 11: Defence. All Games This is a database containing all 910 games on the DVD. If you own Chessbase, you can view this database in different ways, such as by player, tournament, endgame type, main theme, strategy, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed the wide-rage of topics in CBM 132 and the variety of learning formats. ChessBase Magazine is published six times a year, and I highly recommend any chess enthusiast to give one a try.
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