Instructive Modern Chess Masterpieces (Instructive Chess)

A new edition of a winner of the US Chess Federation Award for Best BookNew ebook feature: every diagram is also a link to a lichess analysis board of that position!“This is an outstandingly thorough and insightful book. ... I heartily recommend it” - GM Jonathan Rowson62 brilliant games involving the best players in the world, with notes by one of the top annotators.Igor Stohl has selected 62 outstanding games from recent years and analysed them in painstaking depth. Here he presents his findings to chess enthusiasts, who will find the games entertaining and the annotations both instructive and illuminating. Stohl is an outstanding theoretical expert, so the opening phase of each game reads like a lesson in the key strategic aspects of the opening chosen, with a critical survey of modern trends. The middlegame is dissected and the critical decisions subjected to keen scrutiny - we are invited inside Stohl’s laboratory to join him in the quest for the truth. The endgame phase, if reached, is handled with similar erudition, with insights into the grandmaster’s approach to questions of technique. Following each game there is a discussion of the most important lessons to be learned.The expanded and revised new edition of this award-winning work features 12 new top-level games from the period 2000-7 annotated in great depth - about 40% new material. There are also corrections to the existing notes and a revised Introduction.“Stohl scores over earlier annotations with a beguiling blend of deep analysis and adroit commentary” - John Saunders, British Chess MagazineIgor Stohl is a well-known grandmaster from Slovakia. He plays in several national leagues and is a noted opening theoretician. His thorough annotations frequently appear in Ceskoslovensky Sach, Informator and ChessBase Magazine. The first edition of Instructive Modern Chess Masterpieces won the United States Chess Federation Cramer Award for Best Book. His follow-up was a monumental two-volume work, Garry Kasparov’s Greatest Chess Games.“GM Igor Stohl’s Instructive Modern Chess Masterpieces was a game collection that won the 2001 Cramer Award for Best Book. The new edition is enlarged by 12 well-selected games. Stohl’s opening erudition shows throughout the book. His comments are deep, insightful and of high quality.” - GM Lubomir Kavalek, Washington Post“...a tremendous amount of high quality chess material - a good candidate to take if marooned on a desert island” - IM John Donaldson, USA Team Captain“...the new games make up for an additional 130 pages in the new edition: I’d say that’s pretty good value for money. As could be expected, Stohl didn’t just pick some games from 2000-2007: he picked exactly those that tell the reader most about recent chess (opening) developments. Thus, it’s no coincidence that among the newly added games, we find instructive and exciting encounters with the Petroff, the Berlin Wall, the Chebanenko Slav, the Anti-Moscow Semi-Slav - in other words, precisely those opening systems that have become increasingly popular in exactly those years.” - Arne Moll, ChessVibes Read more