The first official World Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, was born in Prague in 1836, the youngest of 13 children.He honed his chess skills in the coffee houses of Vienna before settling in London to pursue his chess career and develop his ideas. It is from Steinitz, as Kasparov writes, that ‘the era of modern chess began’ due to his theories of chess as an 'accumulation of small advantages' rather than the swashbuckling notion of attack in the Romantic age of chess.
This course is intended to give a taste and flavour of the first Chess World Champion, with lightly annotated famous games and separate trainable strategic and tactical moves - plus a handy reference library of his complete World Championship match games.
This course is split into four sections:
Section 1 – Steinitz Introduction and Annotated Games
After a brief bio on Steinitz the man, this section includes six complete annotated games and one fragment variation (in the style of
the Paul Morphy course) offering light annotations/non-variation heavy commentary of some of the most famous and brilliant games Steinitz has ever played.
Section 2 - Trainable Moves
This section features trainable moves all taken from the annotated games. The emphasis is on strategy here but there are also some key tactical combinations. The 'strategy' setting in this section means that you will see each move first time round, but then from the reviews you are on your own.
Section 3 - Tactical Puzzles
In this part of the course you will face a selection of tactics taken from the Steinitz’s games as a whole. These are not taken from the annotated games section and are on the 'tactics' setting. This means that you will face traditional tactical puzzles playing as the World Champion each time.
Section 4 - Complete Reference Library of World Championship Matches
The last section features an unannotated reference library of all of his World Championship match games. Each game has been labelled and ordered from the perspective of Steinitz, win, lose or draw.
This course is designed for a casual and reflective study of Steinitz and shouldn’t take up too much time or break the bank for the busy chess player. The fact that there are just 30, carefully selected, trainable variations in the whole course, means it is easy to digest and master some key moves and ideas from this early chess-obsessed genius.
Circles and arrow annotations, clickable variations and computer soft fails have been added to the course for the user's benefit.
