Dr.Dave's Canon of educational chess games

Introduction

The games and positions below have been compiled through a weekly discussion group in Exeter Chess Club as being useful examples, mostly trawled from books and magazines. They have been aimed at club players in the BCF 100-150 grade range (ELO up to 1800); the simplest should be accessible to all, the deepest I am only beginning to understand myself (= ELO about 1800! [USCF 1900]).

Download

If you want to download the complete canon of games in database format, you can have it

as pure PGN, or
the main file and index for users of ChessBase 1.11 or Fritz versions 1-4, or
ChessBase 6.0 Zip file (.cbh and all the others) for CB 6/7 or Fritz 5.
Games and analysis used in the opening booklets are kept separately; again you can have them as PGN, two ChessBase 1.11 files, or a ZIP file for CB 6.0.

ChessBase files can be used by many other commercial and PD database programmes, and either the CB or the PGN files can be converted into other database formats using readily available PD utilities.

You can download demonstration versions of ChessBase 1.11 and 6.01 from the ChessBase Site.

You can also get the whole of the chess on this site (the Canon and other games with explanatory notes) as a gzipped tar file [9Mb file, use TAR and GZIP to unpack].

It is, as you might expect, rather derivative, but hopefully there are some examples you haven't seen before.

I've roughly grouped the examples under: Model attacking games {D}, Pawn sacrifices {B}, The Art of Attack {D}, Tactics {D}, Opening guidelines, examples and traps {D}, Strategy and position {D}, Practical play {B}, Problems and play {A}, Simple chess {B}, Analysis {A}, Defence {B}, Errors {B}, Manoeuvring {A}, Psychology {C}, Endgames {D}, {C}, Lessons from the masters {B} and Personal Style {C}.

The original games were all in plain HTML but I hope most people can use the new Javascript-based Palview version, or, if not, download and use the PGN files.

Comments

and contributions You can send me comments and games (Portable Game Notation [PGN] format preferred, example available) at chessnutNOSPAM@blueyonder.co.uk.
In particular I'd like to know about: * hits and misses for topics and examples
* names for any of the players marked NN or Anon.
* club players' own examples of these topics (too many are mine!)
* queries on particular games: I have used most of these games with groups, and I'm always being asked " why can't Black play...", and I often don't have a good answer. I'd like to add notes where I can to cater for these suggestions.

"Far from all the obvious moves that go without saying are correct"

-- BRONSTEIN

P.S. If you find odd dates (e.g. 2004) or grades (club players with grades over 2500) this is because Fritz has decided that there are no grades and no dates below 1700 or so. Harass the company... (Can you convert BCF to ELO?)

This document (canonidx.html) was last updated 3rd June 1998.

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Dr. Dave