Key Concepts of Chess - Pawn Structures Vol.1 and 2
In this two-part course the emphasis will be on typical pawn-structures.
Jan Timman (born in Amsterdam on December 14, 1951) was the Netherlands' top chess player for many years. He won the Dutch Championship nine times and was a long-standing member of the world's elite, even reaching second place in the global rankings behind Anatoly Karpov. Timman twice challenged Karpov for the world title and was at one point considered "The Best of the West."
His father, Reinier Timman, was a distinguished professor of mathematics at the Technical University Delft, and his mother, Anna Petronella de Leeuw, had also studied mathematics. Following in their footsteps, Timman briefly studied mathematics before settling in Amsterdam as a professional chess player. He was known for his epicurean lifestyle, frequenting the artistic circles of Amsterdam's "De Kring" artists' society, where he met and married Surinamese psychologist IlseMarie Dorff. They had two children, Dehlia and Arthur, before divorcing in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, Timman married chess star Geertje Dirkse, whom he met at the Tata Steel Chess Tournament in Wijk aan Zee.
Timman learned chess at the age of eight and won the Dutch Junior Championship under 20 at age 14. In 1967, he placed third in the World Junior Under-20 Championship. After becoming an IM in 1971 and a GM in 1974, Timman's father, initially skeptical of his son's chess ambitions, accepted his success. Throughout the 1970s, Timman secured notable victories, including the IBM tournament in Amsterdam 1978 and the tournament in Bled/Portoroz 1979, where he defeated World Champion Anatoly Karpov.
Despite two unsuccessful attempts to qualify for the world championship in 1972 and 1975, Timman won the Zonal tournament in Amsterdam 1978. Although he narrowly missed advancing in the 1979 Interzonal tournament in Rio de Janeiro, his game against Velimirovic, involving a complex endgame, remains legendary.
By 1982, Timman was ranked second in the world, behind Karpov, bolstering his candidacy for the world title. Throughout the 1980s, he won several prestigious tournaments, including the IBM chess tournament (1981), the Hoogovens tournament (1981, 1985), and the WorldCup tournament in Rotterdam (1989). Other significant victories include Las Palmas (1981), Mar del Plata (1982), Bugojno (1984), and Sarajevo (1984). In 1988, he won the important tournament in Linares, Spain.
In 1985 Timman won the Interzonal Tournament in Taxco and qualified for the Candidate Matches, but lost against Artur Jussupow. In the next cycle he did better and defeated Valeri Salov, Lajos Portisch, and Jonathan Speelman, but then lost 2½-6½ in the final against Karpov. In the following cycle, he again reached the final, defeating Robert Hübner, Viktor Kortchnoi, and Artur Jussupow, but in 1993 lost against Nigel Short in the final of the Candidate Matches. However, because Kasparov and Short broke away from FIDE, Timman had the chance to play a FIDE-World Championship match against Karpov, which he, however, lost 8½-12½.
The diagram position is from a game Timman and Karpov played in Bugojno 1978. It is evident that both players are aiming to launch an attack against the opposing king. Timman managed to significantly strengthen his attack by creating an attacking target near the black king with a brilliant concept. What was this ingenious idea that increased the potency of his assault?
Master Class Vol.15 - Viktor Korchnoi
In this video course, experts (Pelletier, Marin, Müller and Reeh) examine the games of Viktor Korchnoi. Let them show you which openings Korchnoi chose to play, where his strength in middlegames were, or how he outplayed his opponents in the endgame.
This week’s show (for Premium Members only)
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