Speelman's Agony: A twofer from the 4NCL

by Jonathan Speelman
1/19/2020 – In this week's column, GM JON SPEELMAN, brings you two of his own instructive games against grandmasters, played in a recent weekend of the Four Nations Chess League. | Send in your own games! Jon welcomes submissions from readers. If your games are selected for the Agony column, not only will you get free detailed commentary of your games by one of chess’s great authors and instructors, and former world no. 4 player, but you also win a free three-month ChessBase Premium Account!
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Agony & Ecstasy #114

Stephen GordonI thought this week that I'd show my two games from last week's 4NCL and, as requested by the survey last year, make the column more didactic. I haven't used ChessBase's training annotation format before but there are a number of questions dotted through the two games.

The season started with a match between my team Wood Green and 3Cs who had Stephen Gordon on top board. [Gordon, pictured, recently annotated games from the Tata Steel Masters -Ed.] I believe we'd drawn all five of our previous games but this time he murdered me!

The second game is against Scottish Champion GM Colin McNab.

 

Click or tap the second game in the list to switch

This DVD offers a complete repertoire for handling this solid opening, often featuring a dynamic approach to pose the opponent more practical problems. Both of the main continuations 3...Nf6 and 3...Be7 are covered in two separate parts.

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Jonathan Speelman, born in 1956, studied mathematics but became a professional chess player in 1977. He was a member of the English Olympic team from 1980–2006 and three times British Champion. He played twice in Candidates Tournaments, reaching the semi-final in 1989. He twice seconded a World Championship challenger: Nigel Short and then Viswanathan Anand against Garry Kasparov in London 1993 and New York 1995.

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