Chess College 3: Technique
By Efstratios Grivas
Published by GAMBIT
Grandmaster Efstratios Grivas lives in Athens, and is also an International Chess Arbiter and Organizer. He has represented his country on a great many occasions, winning an individual gold medal at the 1989 European Team Championship and an individual silver medal at the 1998 Olympiad. He is a FIDE Senior Trainer, a Greek federal trainer and an experienced writer.
Chess College is an exciting new series of books that will take intermediate players to new levels of chess understanding. Efstratios Grivas, a grandmaster and highly experienced chess trainer, provides a wealth of instruction on many important aspects of the middlegame. The emphasis is on practical understanding: whenever he introduces a new idea, Grivas immediately illustrates it with a number of entertaining and instructive examples, many of which are drawn from his own practice.
Volume 3: Technique focuses in particular on certain areas in which knowledge of specific methods, procedures and sequences are especially important, and so can to a degree be considered technical in nature. This book also examines the practical problems when handling positions where one side has a large or decisive advantage. However, as in the two previous volumes, each chapter touches upon many topics, including ones highlighted in other chapters and in other parts of this series. The discussion is started by considering some of the factors that can cause players to fail to make the most of their chances and their potential and how these problems can be fixed.
The chapters are as follow…
This book is started off with a chapter titled "Why do we lose?". It explains many of the reasons players lose, all the way from momentary blindness to psychological reasons to ignorance of the opening. Next is physical and psychological factors, where Grivas talks about the important subject that so many players neglect to pay attention to today. Right after that Grivas lists some chess literature for study that has had a particular influence on his chess play. This is followed by chapters on material imbalances, bishop pair, bishop against knight, and knight against bishop. These chapters show the techniques of how to use the particular material imbalances. Next up are 2 chapters on important bishop sacrifices to win material or checkmate, the classical bishop sacrifice and double bishop sacrifice, both very important ideas especially when attacking. After that come the chapters on won positions and lost positions, showing the disastrous mistakes often made when the player has a winning position and how to set up a defence and create play when you have a losing position. After that it switches back to material imbalances for a chapter on opposite colored bishops. For many players, opposite-colored bishops are linked with peaceful results, even if there is a material advantage (1-2 pawns). The view, though not without merit where the theory of pure opposite-colored bishop endgames is concerned, is quite unfair to the many possibilities offered by this imbalance. Now we get to the section on small advantages. That small advantage is not enough to win in itself, but the player must take that small advantage and make it bigger, little by little. In this chapter, that is what is clearly shown, how to get the most out of those small advantages. Knowing how to do so will get a lot more wins out of the positions the player would normally draw. Finally we get to the last chapter of the book, immobilization (blockade). Putting a piece in front of a pawn, not only to stop the pawn, but so that the firepower behind the pawn is also stopped up.
Altogether this is a good book, which covers some interesting and important aspects of the game and one which will also help the intermediate player understand important chess technique in the middlegame and elsewhere.
NSG rating = 9.5 of 10