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Alexei Shirov: My best games in the Spanish Vol. 2

Review by GM Hedinn Steingrimsson

This is Shirovs second multimedia DVD on the Spanish Opening. In his first DVD on the Spanish Shirov mentioned that he thought that the Bc5 system deserved further attention and subsequently started playing this system regularly in many important games in 2007. The mainline arises after: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.00 b5 6.Bb3 Bc5 7.c3 d6 (7…00 is also analysed) 8.d4 Bb6.

Apart from Shirov, Anand also played this line with black in an important game in the Mexico World Championship Tournament. This line gets most attention on this DVD or 5 games with Shirov playing black in them all. Shirov also shows games where he played with white against the Marshall (3 games), Berlin Defence, Breyer, Flohr-Zaitsev and the Chigorin. All the games, with one exception, are quite new or from 2007.

I must admit that I am quite fond of this DVD. Shirov invites the audience to his world of chess and explains what is going on in the opening and the games like he sees it. Apart from being very inspiring Shirov always shows his audience full respect and never shows a hint of arrogance. He does not avoid analysing and expressing his opinion on currently believed critical lines and even points out that according to his experience analysing an opening variation on a multimedia DVD helps him to play the variation better and achieve better results.

Shirov has spent several days on many of the critical lines. Sometimes he does not show his complete analyses, preferring only to show the first moves of some complicated long analyses and explaining the general evaluation and character of the struggle. He succeeds in inspiring his audience to look at the lines further and also gives excellent starting point for further own analysis.

This DVD gets 4.5 stars out of 5 possible. One improvement would be to include an opening database with the lines that where analysed like e.g. in Kasparov’s DVDs on the Najdorf.