Courses (258)

When the pieces come off and the evaluation settles on equality, most players reach for the draw. Anatoly Karpov spent a career doing the opposite. He treated "equal" as a starting position rather than a verdict, tightening his grip until an ending that could not be lost was quietly lost anyway.

That instinct sits at the heart of one of the most common mistakes in chess: the assumption that an equal endgame must end in a draw. Nothing could be further from the truth. Equal endgames — precisely because both sides relax once the position looks balanced — are where the heaviest errors are made, and where a patient player finds wins that were never supposed to exist.

Around 1610, the Italian master Giulio Cesare Polerio set down a knight sacrifice so violent that his countrymen named it after what it left on the board: the Fegatello, the "fried liver." Four centuries later, the same leap onto f7 is still one of the most direct ways to drag Black's king into the open. And the wider 4.Ng5 attack, rather than being refuted by modern engines, has been re-armed by them.

The move that sets it all in motion, 4.Ng5, looks almost like a beginner's lunge. That is exactly its value. From that moment every line revolves around a single square, f7, and Black is forced to solve concrete problems from the very first moves.

There is a kind of move a Slav player learns to dread — 4.g3, 4.Qc2, 4.Qb3, 4.Nbd2 — whose whole purpose is to avoid a theoretical debate rather than win one. White keeps the tension low, sidesteps the heavy theory, and hopes a small pull quietly does the work.
These systems are popular because they are easy for White and awkward for Black to meet without drifting into a slightly worse, passive game. This course takes them seriously, treating each as a battleground that deserves a concrete answer — and giving Black two of them.

There is a paradox at the heart of knight endgames. Two knights cannot force mate against a lone king — one of the first facts every player is taught. Yet add a single pawn to the defending side, and the mate can suddenly appear. The pawn that should have saved him is the very thing that dooms him.
That reversal is the whole subject in miniature. Of all the endings, knight endgames sit closest to pure pawn play, and they inherit its unforgiving arithmetic: a single extra pawn is often enough to win, especially with several pawns still on the board, and one imprecise move can erase an advantage built over hours. Where an extra pawn can be meaningless in opposite-colored bishop endgames or even in rook endgames, here it tends to decide.

Aron Nimzowitsch built a whole way of playing on one unsettling idea: invite your opponent to advance, then turn that advance into a weakness. The Sicilian line that carries his name follows exactly this logic. After 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nf6, Black provokes 3.e5 and then goes to work against it with ...e6 and ...d6.
In The Underrated Nimzowitsch Sicilian - Complete Repertoire for Black, GM Alexey Dreev presents this as one of the most underestimated answers to 1.e4 — a line he calls a personal favorite. He has trusted it in his own games against Caruana and Matlakov, and the course is written in his first-person voice, with GM Pier Luigi Basso as co-author.

Few openings carry a pedigree quite like this one. The Evans Gambit was conceived in 1827 by William Davies Evans, a Welsh sea captain, and every attacking generation since has reached back for it — Morphy and Chigorin in the romantic era, and later Kasparov, who reintroduced it at the highest level against Anand in 1995. It is one of those ideas that never truly retires; each generation rediscovers its bite and adds something of its own.
That is exactly what GM Baadur Jobava and GM Pier Luigi Basso do here. The gambit's logic is unchanged since 1827: after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.b4, White hands over a pawn to gain time on the bishop, build a broad centre with c3 and d4, and open lines straight toward f7. What is new is the modern, engine-tested precision the authors bring to it — including a fresh queenside idea in the main line that gives the whole system a second life.

For most of the Steinitz's history, 5.f4 was the main move. It was where White claimed the most space, and where every French player braced for the main fight. That has quietly changed. Modern theory has worked the 5.f4 lines out so concretely that White struggles to prove anything real — and a second front has opened at 5.Nce2, the positional try where understanding matters more than memory. Part 1 of GM Andrea Stella's Steinitz answers both, and treats them as two different problems needing two different kinds of preparation.

For over a century the Tarrasch has carried a verdict it never earned — that Black concedes an isolated pawn on move four and defends it for the rest of the game; this Platinum repertoire by GM Pier Luigi Basso and IM Dragos Ceres begins from the opposite premise, using the early ...c5 and the thematic ...c4 push to gain space, fix White's structure, and play for the initiative. Built on the modern 5...Nf6 move order across 15 chapters and 100 test positions, it answers every White system after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 — the Fianchetto mainlines, the Bg5 tries, the Symmetrical e3 setups and the sidelines — with the plans behind the moves, not just the moves.

he King's Indian rests on a bargain. Black hands over the centre and the space, pushes ...e5, and after White closes the position with d5, Black receives in exchange the one thing that makes the whole opening worth playing: the kingside attack. The pawn break with f5 and a potential pawn storm, rook lift, and a potentially devastating attack.
The Makogonov System cancels that bargain. After 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.h3, White plays the quietest move on the board — and it turns out to be the first move of the most aggressive plan available. The pawn on h3 takes ...Ng4 and ...Bg4 away, which allows Be3 without harassment, and it prepares g2-g4. The break Black has been counting on since move one now costs far more to arrange, and it is White who takes the kingside first.

The Ruy Lopez is usually White's kind of fight. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5, the familiar roads lead to slow, deeply mapped positions where White keeps the tension and sets the pace, while Black spends the middlegame answering questions rather than asking them.
The modest-looking 3...g6 changes that on move three. Black declares the character of the game at once: fianchetto the bishop, aim it down the long diagonal at White's centre, and head for an unbalanced struggle where the full point is a genuine target for both sides. As Pier Luigi Basso frames it in the introduction, this is a way to fight the Spanish and play for a complicated game — not to equalise quietly, but to reach positions with rich play for either side.