Chess Strategy

After the intense work with Baku Grand Prix coverage, I decided to reward myself with a good chess book and ordered Glenn Flear’s “Practical Endgame Play - Beyond the Basics”. It should be fun to go over 544 pages of endings with two pieces and pawns for each side. At the same time, I always look for the candidate books that I could buy on next turn, after those endings saturate me.

One title, “True Lies in Chess” by GM Lluís Comas Fabregó, immediately caught my attention. At first I thought this is another book about Fischer, Kasparov, Soviets, KGB or some other controversial subject that people use when they want to earn quick buck. So I wanted to see what is this all about and the first stop was website of Quality Chess, who published this work.

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For the first time I was on other side of the table. Frederic Sellier asked me for interview with Pokemon Chess Blog and I gladly accepted. I would also like to thank Frederic for his help in providing contact with GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and other French bloggers.

Read the interview

Our contributors IM Miodrag Perunovic and Bogdan Girmacea are currently competing at the big International Romanian Chess Open in Predeal. After two rounds, Miodrag has 2 points and is scheduled to meet Polish GM Pawel Jaracz, while Bogdan is on one point having lost against GM George-Gabriel Grigore in the first round.

Tournament website

Articles:

Hanging Pawns 3 - Bogdan Girmacea
Sicilian Dragon vs Fianchetto - IM Miodrag Perunovic
How to bust the Sicilian Dragon sidelines - IM Miodrag Perunovic

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It took us a bit over 9 months to reach the 50,000 visits on Chess Strategy blog. A big thanks to all the loyal readers and fellow webmasters for your support. In the future, I hope to fulfill some of the promises given back in January, and beyond that, to improve the content and navigation.

Top priority for now is to complete the Hanging Pawns E-Book. It will be available in PGN and PDF formats and I really want to hear your feedback.

There is also possibility to publish theoretical material on Sicilian Dragon. That would be some detour, since this blog is mostly dealing with middlegames and endings, but the material is written by an Sicilian Dragon expert and the readers who play this opening might benefit from it.

Finally, I’d love to continue with video lessons, once in a while, but first have to fix my ActiveX controls. GM Alex Finkel is also interested in contributing with videos, we’ll see how it goes.