Anand's Technique

This game was taken from an old game of Viswanathan Anand in Biel 1997 against one of the strongest GMs of the day, Joel Lautier.

We begin our quest with move 30.

Lautier just played 30. Qe1.

We know the a-pawn is definitely going to fall and it's pointless to defend this but Anand shows a good way of taking control of the game and winning this.

In this position, what would you do?

I won't give you the answer here but I'll link the actual answer to chessgames.com.

Once you've see the moves Anand plays, everything becomes crystal clear and is self-explanatory. Anand displays very fine technique here in the art of positional play.

Chess Players Are A Pretty Sad, Lonely Bunch

You know your hobby is not acting in your best interests and is probably affecting your social life when one of your favourite websites starts doing product placements like this:


Could be worse. My first reaction was that one of my favourite GMs, Sergei Movsesian underwent a really amazing sex-change operation.... (that's because chessgames.com tends to put the player's photos at the exact same spot where the ad is).

Hmm..... I wonder how many hits that advertisement generated.