Hello chess friends! This month’s column was inspired by a reader! Matthew Brodhead sent in his game against John Cissik, and analyzing his game gave me the idea for this month’s column. GM Savielly Tartakower (whom I love to quote!) once said that any opening is good enough to play if its reputation is bad enough. What he meant was that once a line gets a reputation as a loser, it becomes fodder for those who are willing to work to find improvements and use them to gain points in competition.
“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.
With a nod to the Bard, we will once again look at games that involve attacks against the king. In response to last month’s column, I was sent our first game, with notes, by the winner. Patrick Walsh, also known as Konchog, describes himself as, “a deaf-blind chess player whose first tournament was the 1972 Texas Open – the tournament where Ken Smith introduced the Smith-Morra Gambit, and the tournament that also produced one of the finest endgames ever played, a masterpiece by Botvinnik against Reshevsky.
Shopping For a Sicilian As I mentioned in a prior column, I tend to respond symmetrically as Black except against 1.e4. I have several approaches I use against 1.e4 from time to time (the French, the Caro-Kann, and even the Scandinavian), but I have always enjoyed the counter-attacking nature of the Sicilian Defense. The problem I face is in which line to choose.