“In ‘miniature’ games, errors are soon magnified” - Dylan Loeb McClain, New York Times Hello chess friends! Welcome to the annual miniatures column, where we limit the entries to games of 25 moves or less in length. For this year’s selection, all of the games were won by the players of the black pieces. The games are presented here in order of ECO Code.
ChessBase Magazine offers a window to the world of professional chess. The latest issue, CBM 216, is out. Our columnist Nagesh Havanur takes a look. Included are 968 games (34 annotated), decisive encounters from the World Cup deeply annotated, 11 opening surveys, 3 opening videos, 6 demo lectures and several exercises for training. Annotators include Anish Giri, Peter Heine Nielsen, Nijat Abasov, Vidit Gujrathi and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, among others. The icing on the cake is a feature on Hou Yifan with 22 annotated games. She has just won the Julius Baer Women’s Speed Championship for the second consecutive time. | Photo: FIDE / Stev Bonhage
The Opening Encyclopaedia 2023 impresses with a huge scope and is the largest collection on opening theory with almost 1400 theory articles and 7,444 opening surveys. In 70 videos with a total running time of 29 hours the latest trends are presented by grandmasters. Vojko Mencinger has taken a look at the work, which is available at a special price this week in the Summer Special bundle with ChessBase 17.
Those who are familiar with Rainer Knaak's column in ChessBase Magazine will have noticed that many trap motifs in tournament practice recur again and again in the same or a similar form and lead to quick decisions. That is certainly also a reason why the trap expert generally recommends spicing up one's own repertoire with opening traps or even building one's repertoire from a broad collection of traps. In the current CBM #210, Rainer Knaak presents a parade building block for the Sicilian Paulsen Variation. You can watch his video analysis of this trap in full here!
This week Robert Ris will have a look at a brilliant sacrifice in the Caro-Kann Advance Variation, which helped Pavel Eljanov to a fine win in the German Bundesliga. | "Fast and Furious" is available on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can <a href="https://account.chessbase.com/en/create-account" target=" blank">register a Premium account here</a>.