Game of the Week #576: R. Rapport vs C. Lupulescu

by Merijn van Delft
7/12/2023 – In his Game of the Week show #576 Merijn van Delft takes a look at an instructive game Richard Rapport won against Constantin Lupulescu at the Croatia Blitz & Rapid Grand Chess Tour Tournament in Zagreb. | Merijn’s show is available on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here.
In this Fritztrainer: “Attack like a Super GM” with Gukesh we touch upon all aspects of his play, with special emphasis on how you can become a better attacking player.

Game of the Week #576

The SuperUnited tournament in Zagreb was convincingly won by Magnus Carlsen, who compensated for a slow start in the rapid part by a phenomenal 9 out of 9 run in the first half of the blitz.

Firouzja and Rapport also got into a good flow in several of their games. Eventually we decided to choose Rapport-Lupulescu as our Game of the Week, since an instructive strategical mistake was punished by clever manoeuvring and a whole series of fireworks.

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.