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Showing posts from March, 2020

Disaster strikes

Chess can be brutal. It seems that at any given moment your position can go from playable (or even winning) to completely lost. I am sure it hasn't happened to you, but I have certainly found myself in this uncomfortable situation many times. Even the most experienced players fall victim to this every now and then. This is but a small consolation for the suffering amateur. But the true upside is that there is something to be learned here. This is especially true when a player loses right out of the opening due to an incorrect plan or other mistakes. Danish/American trainer and author Carsten Hansen has collected a number of games in this category and put them together in no less than ten books. I have had the opportunity to read one of them and would like to share my thoughts on it with you. What can you expect from this book? A chess miniature is a chess game that ends quickly. This is perhaps a somewhat simplistic definition, but it is probably as close to a "true...