Search results for ""Author Gerard Welling""

Spend more study time on whats really decisive in your games! The average chess player spends too much time on studying opening theory. In his day, World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker argued that improving amateurs should spend about 5% of their study time on openings. These days club players are probably closer to 80%, often focusing on opening lines that are popular among grandmasters. Club players shouldnt slavishly copy the choices of grandmasters. GMs need to squeeze every drop of advantage from the opening and therefore play highly complex lines that require large amounts of memorization. The main objective for club players should be to emerge from the opening with a reasonable position, from which you can simply play chess and pit your own tactical and positional understanding against that of your opponent. Gerard Welling and Steve Giddins recommend the Old Indian-Hanham Philidor set-up as a basis for both Black and White. They provide ideas and strategies that can be learned in the shortest possible time, require the bare minimum of maintenance and updating, and lead to rock-solid positions that you will know how to handle. By adopting a similar set-up for both colours, with similar plans and techniques, you will further reduce study time. Side-stepping Mainline Theory will help you to focus on what is really decisive in the vast majority of non-grandmaster games: tactics, positional understanding and endgame technique. Gerard Welling is an International Master and an experienced chess trainer from the Netherlands. He has contributed to NIC Yearbook and Kaissiber, the freethinker's magazine on non-mainline chess openings. Steve Giddins is a FIDE Master from England, and a highly experienced chess writer and journalist. He compiled and edited The New In Chess Book of Chess Improvement, the bestselling anthology of master classes from New In Chess magazine.

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Co-author Michael Basman has been reputed to be an original and independent chess player and thinker for the whole of his chess career. However, around 1978 he mobilized his creativity to develop new ways in chess strategy, based on a personal set of avant-garde opening systems such as the St.George (early b4.. of ..b5) and Grob (early g4.. or ..g5). Consistently employing his new ideas, a whole new system of chess playing gained recognition among his colleagues, and generated a cult following among chess amateurs. Around 1990 Mike took the next step by creating the Global opening and it's pincer movements from the flanks. This constituted the final stage in the ultra-hyper-modern school of flank-strategy that he started 12 years earlier. Pressed by popular demand, Mike Basman has written several popular works on his ideas such as 'St. George's opening', 'The Killer Grob' and 'The Global opening' but these bestsellers have gone out of print a long time ago. So both authors felt it was about time to revive interest in the “Basmanic” school of chess. Mike has supplied most of the material, and co-author Gerard has accepted the task (as a former cult-follower in his younger days) to do a critical selection and examination of everything available. We hope that 2021, the year that Mike Basman turns 75, will see a revival of Basman's avant-garde ideas in chess among players of the new generations.

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Many club players think that studying chess is all about cramming as much information in their brain as they can. Most textbooks support that notion by stressing the importance of always trying to find the objectively best move. As a result amateur players are spending way too much time worrying about subtleties that are really only relevant for grandmasters. Emanuel Lasker, the second and longest reigning World Chess Champion (27 years!), understood that what a club player needs most of all is common sense: understanding a set of timeless principles. Amateurs shouldnt waste energy on rote learning but just strive for a good grasp of the basic essentials of attack and defence, tactics, positional play and endgame play endgame play. Chess instruction needs to be efficient because of the limited amount of time that amateur players have available. Superfluous knowledge is often a pitfall. Lasker himself, for that matter, also studied chess considerably less than his contemporary rivals. Gerard Welling and Steve Giddins have created a complete but compact manual based on Laskers general approach to chess. It enables the average amateur player to adopt trustworthy openings, reach a sound middlegame and have a basic grasp of endgame technique. Welling and Giddins explain the principles with very carefully selected examples from players of varying levels, some of them from Laskers own games. The Lasker Method to Improve in Chess is an efficient toolkit as well as an entertaining guide. After working with it, players will dramatically boost their skills without carrying the excess baggage that many of their opponents will be struggling with.

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