Instructive Positions from Master Chess

Instructive Positions from Master Chess (Download)
by Jacques Mieses

What if someone could present the critical point of chess games between top-level players, and demonstrate the key ideas and mechanics of winning or drawing. Imagine an experienced Grandmaster showing example after example of crushing finishes and narrow escapes, all explained with notes directly on point and delivered in a friendly and engaging style.

That's what you get with Instructive Positions from Master Chess. The author presents 125 positions gathered from World Championship matches to blindfold and simultaneous exhibitions, from super-tournaments to off-hand club games. But these are neither "traps" nor the usual "guess the next move" positions. Instead, each example is supplied with commentary, selected and arranged according to difficulty, then divided into three categories - opening, middlegame, and endgame. The result is a serious lesson in attack and defense, in handling the initiative or creating counterplay, and wrapping up a won game or salvaging a nearly hopeless situation.

And all by the hand of Jacques Mieses!

Recall that Mieses is a notable figure in chess history on several counts. He enjoyed the longest playing career of any International Grandmaster, winning tournaments for over 6 decades and giving lectures and exhibitions for a further 10 years. Mieses was born during the Lincoln administration, and died during Eisenhower's first term; during that time he won more brilliancy prizes than most Grandmasters combined. He loved the attacking Romantic style of chess, but if White's first move is the hypermodern 1.d3 then he is playing the "Mieses Opening" - one of his several positional contributions to opening theory. Mieses was also numbered among the 27 original FIDE Grandmasters, a title created and first awarded in 1950.

Published in 1938, this 80th anniversary edition of Instructive Positions from Master Chess has been digitally remastered for the 21st century. An almost forgotten classic is now accessible to the modern chess public, interactive and machine readable, yet retaining the flavor of its time. Here is a cutting edge e-book, faithful to the original, but much more than suggested by the original boilerplate text: "A collection of 125 particularly instructive and interesting positions from master play, from the time of Anderssen to the present day, collected and annotated by a well-known player."

Indeed. But they might have added that Instructive Positions from Master Chess will definitely shorten the road to chess mastery, while guaranteed to enlighten and entertain along the way!

System requirements:
You will need ChessBase 6.0 or higher, or Fritz (Komodo, Houdini, etc), or download the free ChessBase Reader here. Also: Pentium 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Windows 10, 9, Vista, or Windows XP (Service Pack 2)