Learn from Nimzowtisch
Get ready to dive into one of the most comprehensive and instructive coverages of Aaron Nimzowitsch that has ever been made. GM Mihail Marin continues with his exploration of the classical heritage. In this huge course, Marin provides an in-depth analysis of 35 games played by Nimzowitsch. The games are divided into 9 categories:
✅ Incursion into Hypermodernism
✅ Blockade
✅ Limited Mobility - Positions with Doubled Pawns
✅ Slowdown of the Enemy Centre
✅ Fight for the Centre
✅ Neglecting the Centre
✅ Excessive Defence and Prophylaxis
✅ The Birth of New Openings
✅ Simplifying and Exchanges
At the end of the database, you will find 40 interactive test positions taken from the practice of Aaron Nimzowtisch. Every test comes with an extensively annotated solution!
The course also comes with a Video Version (5h and 15min Running Time).
Introduction by GM Mihail Marin
The name Nimzowitsch is most likely known by any club player in the world. The Nimzo-Indian Defence has been enormously popular for many decades already and remains one of the most reliable weapons with black up to today. Nimzowitsch's contribution to the Nimzo-Indian and the complementary Queen's Indian was huge, and he started to play them with almost no previous practical material available. In many games, his play had a genuinely modern character.
The more experienced ones would know that 1.b3 (or 1.Nf3 followed by 2.b3) is called the Larsen-Nimzowitsch opening and that the setups 1.e4 Nc6 and 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nf6 are also bearing his name. When working on this database, I discovered with surprise that the system 1.c4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Nf3 Nc6 4.e4!? was also introduced by Nimzowitsch. In the same tournament, he also played 1.e4 c5 2.Nc3 Nc6 3.Nf3 e5!? (with black), with very few and irrelevant previous games with it. Nimzowitsch called these two systems taken together "The Dresden system", after the name of the city where the tournament took place.
The width of Nimzowitsch's contribution to the opening theory is clear now, but this is not all we can say about him. During the '20s and the '30s, Nimzowitsch was one of the strongest players in the world. There is a widely spread rumor that his visiting card included the title "world chess title candidate". In fact, that would not be an exaggeration, since Nimzowitsch beat Alekhine three times, twice during the latter's best years. It would show a bit of lack of modesty, but the truth is that there is no physical evidence of the existence of those cards. Nobody ever seems to have confessed to seeing at least one such.
If we compare Nimzowitsch with a true titan of his times, Akiba Rubinstein, there is an interesting historic fact. One of Rubinstein's greatest results ever (if not the greatest) was his win in San Sebastian 1912. It happened that in the last round he faced Nimzowitsch, who was leading by half a point. By winning the game, Rubinstein secured the first place, but as you can find out from the test database, Nimzowitsch lost that hard-fought game from a position where he had a perpetual check.
Talking about Nimzowitsch's style, we should first mention that together with Reti, he was one of the greatest promoters of hypermodern chess. There seems to have existed something like a division of labor between them, since Reti mainly played in this style with white, while Nimzowitsch with black!
As most innovative ideas, Nimzowitsch's opening approach was anything but unanimously approved. Dr. Tarrasch systematically criticized his play, and his commentaries on Nimzowitsch's games could be summed up as "one cannot play like this!" Alekhine was less radical and less specific. He only stated that he detaches himself from hypermodernism. These were only words, though. As we will repeatedly see in the database, Alekhine was keen to use Nimzowitsch's new ideas only days after he introduced them, sometimes on the very next day! It could be that Alekhine did not regard the Nimzo-Indian as a hypermodern opening and that he mainly referred to Reti's games.
Otherwise, Nimzowitsch was an enterprising positional player, gifted with sharp tactical skills, too. We can find very slow positional games in his collection, but also many games or fragments played in Morphy's or Tal's style.
Finally, we reach the possibly most interesting part. Most modern players of any level must have heard about a book with the mysterious title "My System", written by Nimzowitsch. Players with such different styles as Tal and Petrosian have famously praised Nimzowitsch's writings. I am not sure, though, about how many have read it or at least opened the book for a minute.
I was also intrigued that several modern commentators consider Nimzowitsch's books outdated or of little practical use nowadays. Without entering any dispute, I must just say that I find the book and many of the games quite interesting.
Speaking for myself, during my early teenage years, I thought that the book was a monograph of the Nimzo-Indian. Only later, I found out that it was a manual, in which Nimzowitsch explained a wide range of positional ideas. For several decades, I had in my library a Russian volume published in 1984 and containing Nimzowitsch's capital books: “The Blockade” (first published in Berlin 1925), “My System” (Berlin 1925-1927), and “My System in Practice” (Berlin 1929), together with a few other less important writings. Over the decades, I have occasionally opened it and played a few games over the board, but decided to submit it to thorough examination only recently. The results are comprised by this and the test databases.
The chapters included in my work do not cover all the themes examined by Nimzowitsch. I have chosen only those, which are most typical for him and remain instructive and perhaps a bit surprising for the modern reader. From a general perspective, I have highlighted Nimzowitsch's contribution to the opening theory, his strength as a player, and the new ideas advocated in his books.
In my comments to new or classical games, I rarely use references to the engines' opinion in specific positions. With Nimzowitsch, I have made an exception each time I wanted to highlight the accuracy of his play or comments.
Since Nimzowitsch mainly used his own games as practical examples, not all the sections are illustrated as well as he might have wished them to be. Some of them have "flexible" titles and introductions, combining themes that may be tightly related but may also be not. For instance, we have the "excessive" defense together with prophylactic thinking. They are related, indeed, but have their own individuality.
Nimzowitsch does not dedicate any chapter to development, but developing greatly involves centralizing, and he has chapters on that matter. I have taken the liberty of including games featuring developing issues into the section about the center.
Whenever I quote Nimzowitsch, I translate from Russian to English. While my translation should be quite accurate, I cannot be sure whether the Russian edition faithfully reproduced the original German text. In his writings, Nimzowitsch shows himself as a refined, high-level intellectual.
My final message before moving on is that I have greatly enjoyed working on these databases, and there was a moment when I was not sure whether I could put an end to my frantic work. I can only hope that you will share my enthusiasm when studying it.