Yasser Seirawan: My Best Games (Vol. 1?)
Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 12:35AM Grandmaster, two-time Candidate and former World Junior and U.S. Champion Yasser Seirawan has just released his first DVD with ChessBase. It covers his early career, from 1975 (when he defeated his first GM in tournament play) to 1982 (when he played his first game against a sitting world champion; by this point he had already won the World Junior, become a GM and won major tournaments). Over the course of five hours he presents 22 of his games in his characteristically warm and chatty style - he's as much raconteur as analyst in these videos.
I enjoyed his presentations a lot, and think you will too. Does it mean you should fork over the money to buy this DVD? That I can't say. What I can say is this. First, I think most viewers will appreciate his style of presentation, and that will make it a good entertainment value. Further, and this is important, his chess style is very different from most of the top GMs playing today.
Let's start with the openings. On the DVD you won't find any 1.e4 e5 games, there's only one Sicilian, and only two games that could be classified under 1.d4 d5 codes, and then only by transposition. Seirawan mostly plays the English with White in these early games, and with Black you'll get a steady dose of Frenches and Caro-Kanns. If you think you're in for stodge-R-us, however, you're in for a pleasant surprise. His games are very energetic, and Seirawan was as much of a fighting player as anyone else, especially in his ambitious youth. (Example: As a teenager facing Mikhail Tal, rated 2705 at the time, Seirawan turned down a draw in an inferior position!)
It's not only his openings that are distinctive. His ability to maneuver and handle his king in unusual ways will remind some viewers of Nimzowitsch, Larsen and Petrosian (in their different but related ways), and if those three players are members of a distinctive school, I'd say that Seirawan was its Dean in the 1980s and 1990s. Looking at games like the ones he presents on the disc will open up a new world to some viewers, and it's to Seirawan's credit that he does this in a way that generates enthusiasm and a feeling of understanding rather than alienation and bewilderment.
In short, I'm enthusiastic about this disc, and I hope there will be more. (Perhaps that depends on whether anyone buys this one, so I hope that a bunch of my American readers especially will support a man who did quite a lot for chess in the U.S. More info (but no sample, unfortunately) can be found here.
Seirawan in DVD Reviews
Reader Comments (4)
Dennis is right. Great chess entertainment, I enjoyed this DVD very much.
Yasser had the best *positional* sense among the US juniors in the 1970s, on top of playing the endgame well. Everyone should know his win over Karpov at London 1982, and he beat Kasparov as WC too.
Ken, I assume you had some fun battles with him in your junior days. Any stories you care to relate?
About the games, it's true that they're wins over sitting world champions, but both wins resulted from outright blunders: 13...c5 simply lost a piece in the Karpov game (but check out Karpov's really spectacular revenge later in the year (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1068276), starting with the ugly-looking 13...b5!!), while Kasparov committed suicide overpressing in a drawn ending. It's a great achievement beating a sitting world champion - let alone two, especially of their caliber - but neither game strikes me as among of his best, if you ignore the victims' names.
Ah, you are right! I had conflated my memory of the two games. When I started typing my post, my memory was "the game where Seirawan beat Karpov with a King walk around Move 15." I was mystified in not seeing Kd2 when playing thru the moves at chessgames.com. I had visited the Phillips and Drew tournament the day after Yasser's win in 1982, so I thought maybe I was remembering some analysis. Karpov's game has the brilliance I was crediting Yasser with---an interesting cognitive semi-fallacy this.
We faced each other three times that I remember in US Junior Championships. In 1976 he played a great positional game: Qa4+ in a Queen's Indian type position where it was particularly effective, then wrecked my Q-side and won with an outside passed a-pawn. In 1977 I outplayed him as White in an Advance French sideline, almost frittered away my Pawn advantage before Move 40, then found a precise Knight dance from Move 41 on to win the endgame. In 1978 he was down and almost out with a 1-2 record in a 7-round event---even a draw from my advantageous endgame would have likely put him out of the running. But at Move 38 in not-really-time-pressure I inexplicably recaptured backwards with a bishop rather than forwards with a pawn, and let his Furies in. He won-out to nip 1st and qualify for the World Junior Championship, which he won...