ChessBase 17 - Mega package - Edition 2024
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Who
is this grandmaster?Can you guess who the cute young child in the photo is? Once again we provide you with some clues:
He was born in a country which is not that of his parents, i.e. he was "born abroad".
He started playing chess at an early age and showed great talent for the game, gaining the FM, IM and GM titles earlier than most of his compatriots.
In his early career he was often to be seen in the New York City area, where he was friends with Pal Benko and Susan Polgar.
Today he lives in Europe, but does not spent much time in his native country, although he is part of its chess federation and represents it.
He remains a strong GM, rated around 2600, the strongest player in his native country.
In the last weeks or months he played successfully in an international tournament, proving that age does not matter in chess.
To our delight he sends us deeply annotated games that provide valuable insight into the thought processes of a player of his calibre.
To give you an impression of his style of annotation here is a snippet from a game we recently received. The full version of this and a second beautifully annotated game will be published here in a few days. In the following position our grandmaster, who had white, had just played the exchange 14...Nb4xBd3 15.Pc2xNd3. He writes:
In my preparation before the game I assessed this position as favourable for White due to Black's insecure king and White's rapid development. I can only wonder what I was thinking. After Black's next move it is clear he will have few problems with his king, while White will sorely miss his light-squared bishop. 15...b6! Now I suddenly realised that only Black could have an advantage here. I will have very serious problems with my d3-pawn after ...Ba6 and ...Qg6. For whatever reason I had only considered 15...c5?, which is clearly bad due to 16.b4! b6 (16...cxb4 17.Nb3 b6 18.a3 with initiative) 17.Nb3 Qg6 18.bxc5 Ba6 19.Rf3 bxc5 20.Bxf4+/-.
So can you guess who this grandmaster is? As you probably know by now we are quite sneaky with the hints we provide. Naturally they are all true, but sometimes a wee bit misleading. We will reveal the identity of our GM friend, together with a biography and the two annotated games, this weekend.
