4/13/2025 – In this sneak peek, IM Robert Ris presents Volume 3 of his “Mastering Chess Strategy” series for ChessBase, focusing on how to exploit various weaknesses in an opponent’s position. He explains that after the earlier volumes defined and classified weaknesses (e.g., weak pawns, weak squares), this third installment dives deeper into identifying and prioritizing multiple weaknesses—especially around the king—while maintaining awareness of tactical opportunities.
Whether it’s a weak pawn, a vulnerable king, or poor piece coordination, this course will teach you how to pinpoint the critical targets, prioritise your attack, and execute a clear, effective plan. Building on the lessons from the previous volumes, Volume 3 shifts the focus to one of the most essential skills in chess: identifying and attacking your opponent’s weaknesses. Whether it’s a weak pawn, a vulnerable king, or poor piece coordination, this course will teach you how to pinpoint the critical targets, prioritise your attack, and execute a clear, effective plan. But strategy alone isn’t enough — you’ll also need tactical awareness!
Free video sample: Introduction
Free video sample: Attack Weaknesses
Which pieces are good, which are bad, and what can you do about it? Master this principle with this video course!
€39.90
Robert Ris: Exploit your opponent’s weaknesses! - Sneak Peek
A key example is taken from a Gukesh–Abdusattorov game, where White’s best move is surprisingly not an immediate attack on the back rank, but rather a move, strengthening the knight and preparing a winning assault on a weak square.
Ris uses this and other interactive exercises to show how combining strategy (systematically targeting an opponent’s vulnerable points) with concrete calculation (tactics) leads to practical success. Through step-by-step problem-solving, viewers practice finding critical moves themselves, helping them internalize the method of spotting, prioritizing, and exploiting weaknesses in real games.
Whether it’s a weak pawn, a vulnerable king, or poor piece coordination, this course will teach you how to pinpoint the critical targets, prioritise your attack, and execute a clear, effective plan. Building on the lessons from the previous volumes, Volume 3 shifts the focus to one of the most essential skills in chess: identifying and attacking your opponent’s weaknesses. Whether it’s a weak pawn, a vulnerable king, or poor piece coordination, this course will teach you how to pinpoint the critical targets, prioritise your attack, and execute a clear, effective plan. But strategy alone isn’t enough — you’ll also need tactical awareness!
Free video sample: Introduction
Free video sample: Attack Weaknesses
4/3/2025 – Building on the lessons from the previous volumes, Volume 3 shifts the focus to one of the most essential skills in chess: identifying and attacking your opponent’s weaknesses. Whether it’s a weak pawn, a vulnerable king, or poor piece coordination, this course will teach you how to pinpoint the critical targets, prioritise your attack, and execute a clear, effective plan. But strategy alone isn’t enough — you’ll also need tactical awareness!
3/1/2025 – After laying the foundation in Volume 1, it's time to dive deeper into key strategic concepts that will elevate your middlegame play. But don't expect long theoretical explanations - this course is all about active learning!
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.
Experts examine the games of Max Euwe. Let them show you which openings Euwe chose to play, where his strength in middlegames were, which tactical abilities he had or how he outplayed his opponents in the endgame.
This interactive video course of over 8 hours, provides an in-depth exploration of the Pirc Defence, a favoured opening for people looking to play for the win with the black pieces.
Pirc Defence Powerbase 2025 is a database and contains a total of 10027 games from Mega 2025 or the Correspondence Database 2024; of these 874 are annotated.
The Pirc Defence Powerbook 2025 consists for a greater part of engine games (168 000), to which has been added high value material from Mega and the Correspondence Database (115 000).
The free app from ChessBase! ChessBase Mobile has everything you need as a chess player on the go:
access your chess data in cloud databases - and 13 million games.
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