On the start page of ChessBase Magazine Extra # 196, Anna Muzychuk welcomes you to the second part of her video series on the Taimanov Variation. In the first video of this issue, the Grandmaster from Ukraine presents her game against the Indian GM Sethuraman from 2015, in which she chose a line that had just become fashionable at that time: 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nc6 5.Nc3 Qc7 6.Be3 a6 and now 7.Qf3. In the past few years, this move was about to overtake the main move 7.Qd2. And there is a reason for that: after 7.Qd2 White has to master a variety of sharp lines, whereas after 7.Qf3 the game gets a rather linear course that is easy to memorize.
In the second video Anna Muzychuk shows her game against Ralf Akesson from the Gibraltar Open 2013. Here she went for the main continuation 7.Qd2, and after the standard moves 7… Nf6 8.0-0-0 the Swedish GM continued with 8… Be7 - a solid alternative to the main move 8… Bb4. 9.f3 was followed by 9… h5?!, a move that was considered playable at that time. Anna Muzychuk uses her game to show why this advance of the h-pawn is actually a mistake in her eyes. She also shows which lines you should have in mind after the correct continuation 9… b5.
In addition, Adrian Mikhalchishin outlines in his video contribution a concept by Alexander Beliavsky against a modern peasant structure by Black that may occur on the board in the Catalan and in the Queen’s Indian (e.g. after the moves 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 b6 4.g3 c6 5.Bg2 d5 6.0-0 Be7 7.b3 0-0 8.Bb2 Nbd7 9.Qc2 Bb7 10.Nc3 Qc7 11.Rad1 Rac8 12.e4).
The "Lucky bag" is not only awesome because of the great number of commented games. Our authors contributed exciting material from very different areas of chess. Tanmay Srinath, for example, who you may already know as an author of opening articles in ChessBase Magazine, has gone among the correspondence chess players. In this Extra he shows three of his most recent successes in this area.
Romain Edouard and Michal Krasenkow review the highlights of the online tournaments "Lindores Abbey" and "Clutch Chess".And Karsten Müller has also put together a large selection of tricky endgames from "Lindores Abbey" for you.
Georgios Souleidis presents a masterpiece by Teimour Radjabov in "The brilliancy" of this issue. Radjabov celebrated a great comeback last year. Among other things, he qualified for the 2020 Candidates Tournament by winning the World Cup, from which he withdrew in view of the approaching pandemic. Souleidis shows the game Radjabov-Vidit from Wijk aan Zee 2019, in which the Ragosin Variation of Queen’s Gambit was up for discussion.
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