Alterman on the Morphy Attack

Boris Alterman writes: Many masters even before Morphy sacrificed material in order to open files and diagonals. But Morphy always does it only when was sure about his pieces domination on the most important territory of the chess board!

Morphy never lost a tempo and the center was the main point of his strategy. Immediately upon achieving development advantage Morphy breaks and opens files and diagonals for his pieces for a crushing attack.

Botvinnik said about Morphy: 'Up to now Morphy has to be the greatest ever master of open positions. His opening principles were so effective and his mastery of open positions was so vast that little new has been learned about such positions after him.'

This Sunday I am going to continue the Two Knights Defence lecture. The topic of the second part: The Morphy Attack.

GM Boris Alterman is 34, and lives in Israel. He was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, where he started playing chess at the age of 7. His career highlights include earning the IM title in 1991 and the GM title in 1992.He is the winner of the following Open and GM tournaments: Haifa 1993; Bad Homburg 1996; Rishon LeZion 1996; Beijing 1995 and 1997; Munchen 1992. His hobbies include computers and swimming, his favourite food is Chinese, he speaks fluent Russian, Hebrew and English.

Boris has worked for and against Garry Kasparov. In 1999 he assisted the world champion in his spectacular Microsoft match Kasparov vs The World, and was also part of the team that built up the web portal Kasparov Chess. In 2003, on the other hand, he was part of the Deep Junior team that gave Kasparov a run for his money in the New York match.

Boris Alterman will hold his lectures on Sundays at 21:00h Server time and a simultaneous exhibition on Mondays at 21:00h server time (in the "Simultaneous Exhibitions" room).

Here are the world-wide starting times for Alterman's lectures.
The simuls are at the same times one day later.