11/17/2019 – For a second day in a row, Alexander Grischuk got the upper hand against Jan-Krzysztof Duda at the final of the FIDE Grand Prix in Hamburg. Duda lost the opening battle but managed to find correct defensive moves one time after another until the draw was agreed. The champion will be decided in Sunday's tiebreakers. | Photo: Official site
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Chess Festival Prague 2025 with analyses by Aravindh, Giri, Gurel, Navara and others. ‘Special’: 27 highly entertaining miniatures. Opening videos by Werle, King and Ris. 10 opening articles with new repertoire ideas and much more. ChessBase Magazine offers first-class training material for club players and professionals! World-class players analyse their brilliant games and explain the ideas behind the moves. Opening specialists present the latest trends in opening theory and exciting ideas for your repertoire. Master trainers in tactics, strategy and endgames show you the tricks and techniques you need to be a successful tournament player! Available as a direct download (incl. booklet as pdf file) or booklet with download key by post. Included in delivery: ChessBase Magazine #225 as “ChessBase Book” for iPad, tablet, Mac etc.!
Winning starts with what you know The new version 18 offers completely new possibilities for chess training and analysis: playing style analysis, search for strategic themes, access to 6 billion Lichess games, player preparation by matching Lichess games, download Chess.com games with built-in API, built-in cloud engine and much more.
In this course, Grandmaster Felix Blohberger delivers a complete opening repertoire for White, centred around the flexible move 1.Nf3.
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A son of the computer era
The third leg of the FIDE Grand Prix is being played in Hamburg, Germany. The 16-player knockout has a €130,000 prize fund, with the series as a whole having an additional prize fund of €280,000 plus two qualifying spots for the 2020 Candidates Tournament. The tournament takes place in the Kehrwieder Haus from November 5th to 17th. You can find more info here.
For players like Jan-Krzysztof Duda (b. 1998), dissociating the game of chess from the use of computers is almost impossible. Much has been talked about this subject, with one of the generally accepted consequences of this phenomenon being the fact that players have realized many positions that were considered to be lost in the past can actually be defended — the engines have shown that 'winning won positions' is even harder than people used to think.
Alexander Grischuk (b. 1983), on the other hand, experienced what it was like to face someone like Garry Kasparov in classical chess, when the Beast from Baku would frequently win games simply by showing a forced line that gave a large advantage to either side. Needless to say, Grischuk adapted his style to the new conditions — the Russian has had a 2700+ rating in every official FIDE list since April 2002.
Grischuk is fifteen years older than Duda | Photo: Official site
In the rematch game of the final, Duda strangely spent about 18 minutes on move 7, despite the fact that a normal line of the Queen's Gambit Declined was being explored. By the time he played 11.a3, both finalists apparently noticed the position had turned dangerous for White:
This DVD concentrates on the increasingly popular 5.Bf4 variation of the Queen's Gambit Declined and gives White a dynamic and aggressive weapon against Black's set-up.
You can try your own variations on the diagram above
Duda's push of the a-pawn had been seen repeatedly in the past, but it is not a move well-liked by the engines (11.♗e5 seems safer). At this point, Grischuk started calculating intensely, spending half an hour on 11...♝Bd7. Also aware of the sharpness of the position, Duda used over an hour of his clock on his next four moves. The sharp sequence went 12.♕xd5 ♜c8 13.e4 ♛b6 14.b4 ♜fd8 15.bxc5 ♝xc5 16.♗e2.
In the diagrammed position, Grischuk continued with 16...♝b5, preventing White from castling. The Russian was clearly in the driver's seat, but Duda kept defending tenaciously. Four moves later, Grischuk rejected a move that would have further complicated matters — by then, Duda had less than ten minutes on his clock.
The first DVD deals with the initial phase of the game, when the all the reigning principles can be crystalized into just one: DEVELOPMENT!
20...♛xe4 is the kind of move one needs to explore carefully — there would probably follow 21.♘d2 ♛xg2 22.♔xe2 ♔♛xh1, when White has two pieces for a rook, but also quite a vulnerable king. Instead of all this, Grischuk simplified into an endgame with 20...♝xf3 21.♕xf3 ♛xc5, an understandable decision given the circumstances, i.e. why take unnecessary risks with little time on the clock when the worst thing that can happen from going into a slightly superior ending is that the score board will remain tied and everything will be decided on Sunday.
Grischuk kept trying to up the pressure, but Duda never stopped finding precise defensive moves. The draw was agreed on move 38.
Sunday's tiebreaks kick off at the usual time.
All will be decided in rapid and, if necessary, blitz and Armageddon | Photo: Official site
The new Corr Database 2020 is a large ChessBase collection of correspondence games from the period from 1804 to 2019. With more than 80,000 tournaments and over 1.6 million correspondence games.
Carlos Alberto ColodroCarlos Colodro is a Hispanic Philologist from Bolivia. He works as a freelance translator and writer since 2012. A lot of his work is done in chess-related texts, as the game is one of his biggest interests, along with literature and music.
Throughout the video course, Sasikran shows various examples from his career to explain sacrifices for initiative, an attack, a better pawn structure and much more.
In this insightful video course, Grandmaster David Navara shares practical advice on when to calculate deeply in a position — and just as importantly, when not to.
The Trompowsky is especially suited for faster time controls as you don‘t have to memorise endless lines of theory, and you push your opponent out of their comfort zone after your second move.
Trompowsky Powerbook 2025 is based on 53,000 computer games from the engine room of playchess.com as well as 49,000 games from Mega and correspondence chess.
Trompowsky Powerbase 2025 is a database and contains a total of 8727 games from Mega 2025 and the Correspondence Database 2024, of which 316 are annotated.
2025 European Championship with a German double victory and analyses by Bluebaum, Svane, Rodshtein, Yuffa, Navara and many more. Opening videos by Engel, King and Marin. Training sections “The Fortress”, “The Trap” and “Fundamental Endgame Knowledge" etc.
Powerbook based on more than 618 000 games in which White already sidesteps the main variations of the Sicilian on move 2.
€9.90
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