Study Chess with Matthew Sadler

Den uvanlig begavede sjakkmesteren Matthew Sadler gir her gode tips til både åpningsforberedelser, midtspillhåndtering og riktig tenking i sluttspill. Sadler gjorde glimrende comeback i Barcelona og Oslo i 2010 etter en årrekke borte fra sjakkspilling.

Sadlers egen introduksjon til boka:

Despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to escape chess. I decided to stop as a professional chess player just after the Tilburg Category 18 event of 1998, and after some months of job searching, I joined the ranks of the respectable working population on 1st October 1999 when I started work at the Hewlett-Packard helpdesk for mobile computers in Amsterdam. In the years that followed, I still played some chess for my Bundesliga club until 2003, but after that, apart from a yearly outing in the Dutch Team Championship for companies, I was chess-free!

But things change in your life, and at some stage I got the urge to play chess again. More importantly for me, I got the urge to play well again. That was easier said than done. Even though I was still capable of playing decently, I was extremely inconsistent. I decided at some stage that I needed to relearn a few skills and think again about all the hard-earned knowledge I had won as a professional. It took me quite a while, but in the end I felt I had managed to get the most important things in my game working again. The thought that these skills and lessons might be useful and interesting to other amateurs as well was the inspiration for this book.

In this book I try to explain the most important skills for success as a practical chess player, and how you can train and develop these skills. In a nutshell, these skills are:

• a) How to find new ideas in openings.
• b) How to adopt new openings confidently and quickly.
• c) The various ways of solving practical middlegame problems.
• d) How to think in the endgame.

I suppose you could call this book a collection of my personal ‘Eureka!’ experiences, those wonderful moments when something complicated suddenly feels as natural and as easy as breathing. Some of those insights needed a lot of hard work, and some only came after the sorrowful analysis of heart-rending defeats. Hopefully this book can spare you both the midnight oil and the traumas, and set you off on the right path from the very beginning! Kapitlene i boka:

• 1 Discovering New Ideas in the Opening 7
• 2 Introducing New Ideas Easily into your Opening Repertory 34
• 3 Playing Unorthodox Openings 58
• 4 Types of Thinking in the Middlegame 81
• 5 That Didn’t Quite Work Out... 98
• 6 Thinking in Endgames 123
• Index of Openings 138
• Index of Games 139