Game of the Week #522: A positional masterpiece

by Merijn van Delft
6/30/2022 – In his “Game of the Week” show #522 Merijn van Delft looks at a positional masterpiece, in which the knights got dancing and the pawns pushed ahead. | Merijn’s show is available on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here.
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Game of the Week #522

Obviously the Candidates are in full swing and will soon coming to an end with Nepomniachtchi and Caruana being the main contenders. Of course the key games of the Candidates automatically qualify as Game of the Week, but since they already get tons of attention, we figured we will take another game.

The Dutch Grandmaster Max Warmerdam, who is a friend of the show, pointed out the positional masterpiece Sjugirov-Murzin, which we happily present.

Warm-up question: What would you play here with White?

 

This week’s show

In this opening Black opts for active piece play and is not afraid to fight for the initiative from an early stage. One of the many good features of this opening is that Black is often the side which controls the pace of the game.

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Merijn van Delft is an International Master from the Netherlands who lived in Hamburg for many years and is currently based in Amsterdam. After scoring a GM norm in 2017 he is eager for more. His ChessBase show on Wednesday evenings has been running for over ten years now.