VASILY SMYSLOV RIP

Vasily Smyslov the 7th World Chess Champion died on Saturday of heart failure at the age of 89.
I was very lucky to met Smyslov at the Fox Trot tournament in London during 1996.
The tournament was held at the Hilton hotel.
In the tournament Smyslov,Spassky,Hort,Portisch and Taimanov,played against top women players.
Cramling,Ioseliani,Arakhamia,Xie and Sofia Polgar.
On the day i attended the tournament Portisch was to play Polgar,their was a lighting fault and play was suspended for an hour or 2.
Young miss polgar went shopping,moments later the lighting fault was fixed so play started.
Sofia Polgar was traced and play went on as normal.
I got Smyslov to autograph my Dover book of his games, he was very patient with the spectators who wanted photos and autographs.
With his passing chess has lost a true chess great and a gentleman on and off the board.

I give one of his in my opinion best games.
It is often use to show the importance of a knight outpost,but i find this delightfull little game great.

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BEST CHESS TRAINING SOFTWARE

In my School chess club i use CT-art 3.0 and Chess tactics for beginners,both from Convekta now chess ok.
The students work through the puzzles in the programs and are graded/rated at the end.
I find these old programs very good for children to use.
CT-art has now gone to version 4,using the Peshka interface.
As an added bonus to these i also use Fritz 11 to go over some of the childrens games,to get some top level notes.
I am thinking of adding more software from the Convekta/chess ok family,i think they are good value software.
Some may say basic and with faults,but good value.
These programs are installed on computers in the School,and the children can use them when they want to.
The familiarity across the range of these older softwae titles is good for the children.
They are not having to learn new systems for each program.

CAN YOU GUESS THE PLAYER WITH THE WHITE PIECES ?

I came across this game and could not believe the player who has the white pieces.

It is an opening totally out of his norm.

White for a while only moves pieces within the first 3 ranks no attack,once again unlike this player.

Play over the game and see if you can name this famous player.

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