Game of the Week #668: E. Amar - B. Jacobson, Grenke Open 2025

4/24/2025 – In his new Game of the Week show, Merijn van Delft analyses a game, in which Black found a recipe against White's Rossolimo-Variation, and then showed why a pair of knights can be a powerful duo. | Merijn's show is available on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can <a href="https://account.chessbase.com/en/create-account" target="_blank">register a Premium account here</a>.

Game of the Week #667: Lu Shanglei vs Eltaj Safarli, Reykjavik Open 2025

4/19/2025 – In his latest Game of the Week show, Merijn van Delft analyses an encounter played at the Reykjavik Open between Lu Shanglei and Eltaj Safarli. Lu conducted the game in beautiful positional fashion, and once White gained the upper hand, the tactics all started to work in his favour. | Merijn's show is available on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can <a href="https://account.chessbase.com/en/create-account" target="_blank">register a Premium account here</a>.

60m The Two Knights

This entry into the 60 minutes series concentrates on the Modern variation of the Italian game where White opens the centre early : 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bc4 Nf6 4 d4 exd4 5 e5!. This line can be reached by various move orders, most frequently from the Scotch 3 d4 exd4 4 Bc4. It's a sharp variation and Grandmasters such as Evgeny Sveshnikov have used it frequently,with very good results. It's a perfect line for club players to adopt which is relatively easy to learn and which contains many traps. All the main responses are covered here, including 5...d5, 5...Ng4 and 5...Ne4 and the conclusion is that is is difficult for Black to equalize in a straightforward way. Problems are being posed, which over the board might prove tough to solve.