The past month has been rather hectic as I started a new job after 2½ years working at the same customer. Whenever I change jobs, opening books get traded in for technical manuals and chess takes a back seat. In this case, it was unfortunate timing as the last weekend of the 4NCL was looming with champions Guildford (my team) and challengers Cheddleton neck-and-neck at the top and heading for a last-round shootout. Not the right time to lose interest in chess! I was looking for a low-effort way to keep my feeling for chess alive, and so I was very happy to spot four recent DVD’s on positional themes: two by Sergei Tiviakov and two by Adrian Mikhalchishin. Looking at the titles, I hoped that I would get some instruction and inspiration across a broad range of topics.
What do I look for in a DVD? I’ve mentioned before that I mostly watch them slumped on the sofa in a catatonic state after a day’s information overload, so I don’t want anything complicated. No long variations, no enormous digressions, just simple themes, lively examples and clear guidance. In general, these DVDs gave me pretty much what I was looking for!
Sergei Tiviakov’s The Art of Defence and The Art of the Positional Exchange Sacrifice were masterly – a fantastic effort from Sergei. Ever a glutton for punishment, I carried on the positional DVD theme with Pattern Recognition and Typical Plans and Pawn structures you should know, both by Adrian Mikhalchishin. Both DVDs deal with patterns of play in chess and there is much to enjoy in them. There is a wealth of well-chosen examples and Mikhalchishin is an entertaining and lively host. His habit of playing a move on the board and then almost shouting ‘you see!?’ kept me thoroughly entertained all through the many hours of content.
I will have to be churlish though and make one serious complaint about them. It suddenly occurred to me while watching that DVDs don’t have the same quality control as modern chess books. I’ve heard from a number of authors that publishers are blunder-checking the ChessBase files that authors submit and then querying any mistakes they find. Makes sense and it’s a worthwhile effort judging from the quality of the books being published nowadays. It’s much more difficult to do this with DVDs, and I’m afraid that both of Mikhalchishin DVD’s are riddled with tactical mistakes (something that never happens with Tiviakov’s DVDs). I had the strong feeling that Mikhalchishin had selected examples for their thematic content but not necessarily played through the whole game. This leads to some rather strange episodes: for example, in the following game:
It’s really something that should not have been allowed to be released and there are similar episodes in many places. I’d feel bad marking the DVDs too far down because I enjoyed them despite the many mistakes, but just be warned if you do buy them!
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The above review appeared in the 4/2017 edition of New in Chess magazine.
New In Chess (NIC) was founded in 1984 and appears eight times a year. Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam is the editor-in-chief. Besides on-the-spot tournament reports, interviews, chess training and historical articles, the magazine’s hallmark are game comments by the world’s leading players, such as Magnus Carlsen, Vladimir Kramnik, Wesley So, Levon Aronian, Fabiano Caruana, Vishy Anand, Hikaru Nakamura, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Anish Giri, Judit Polgar and many others. It is read by club players in 116 countries. A yearly subscription for eight issues costs €79.99 and can be ordered here.
