Thirst For Adventure

Submitted by Grakovsky on Tue, 03/31/2009 at 6:07pm.

This following text excerpt is a translated by me piece from David Bronstein's book 200 Open Games. This illustrative book was originally published in Russian in 1973 and all content credit goes to the original writer, David Bronstein. Although this book has already been translated into English nearly twenty years ago, I wanted to try myself. Enjoy.


If your library is about to burst from heavy chess tournament collection books and if these books consist of millions of chess combinations, then whether if you like it or not you become cold-hearted to these books, and you are ready to seek some real chess adventures.

In the year when this match was taking place, I owned no old chess books, nor did I own tournament collection books, and I was already being drawn to unpopular combinations, and even the simple ones where you say "check and mate!".

I liked to try out combinations that led to near failure... and later finding secret paths to salvation.

Of course, during my later years, I would be careful about playing 3. Nc3, because with the energetic movement of the queen's pawn Black could capture the key square of d3.

Here is an outstanding example from their possible game: 3... d4 4. Nce2 d3 5. cxd3 Nc6 6. Nf3 Nb4 7. Nxe5 Qxd3 8. Nxd3 Nxd3#! Fast, easy, and beautiful. Don't believe it? And still after all I am afraid of these kinds of combinations. Chess is an unlimited game and if you make only one mistake then your opponent's dreams may come true.

» posted in Grakovsky's Blog
 

Comments:

by Catalyst_Kh - 7 months ago
Kharkov Ukraine
Member Since: Jan 2009
Member Points: 1046

I have this book in russian, it has very interesting and instructive games, but very little commentary to them, half games has no variations included at all, others has just few main variations at critical points of the game. There is a lot of true masterpieces (games), that demands complete and very detailed commentary to show all hidden beauty the game contains. So the one who is planning to buy this book should be ready that he will need to look this games in fritz or etc, or with good coatch who can explain every move, or this is just "uncommented" game database with very nice and emotional biographical comments from Bronstein. :) This biographical comments are very interesting by themselves, but they mostly are not instructive and not explained the moves in the games.

 

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