ALEXEI SHIROV: Endgame Fireworks

* Videorunning time: 4 hours 30 min

On this DVD Alexei Shirov shows how to struggle for the full point until the very end provided you are creative and ambitious. Even in objectively quite level positions, you can frequently find ways to sharpen up or complicate the fight. For the tournament player, it is often only a matter of posing practical problems which the opponent might be unable to solve. Thus Shirov sees himself rather as an endgame practitioner, putting down his successes in this phase of the game less to concrete knowledge about theoretical positions than to the understanding of general principles, good intuition and exact calculation of variations.

One main emphasis of the DVD is the endgame with rooks and different coloured bishops which Shirov finds particularly interesting, analysing five examples. Another important feature is the very complex and difficult setting with four rooks (three examples), where he demonstrates the most helpful general principles. It is worth noting that the day before this DVD was published Shirov played a beautiful 4 rook endgame at the Chess Olympiad and defeated Veselin Topalov.

Alexei Shirov hails from Riga, the birthplace of world champion Mihail Tal, and his playing style reminds many chess fans of Tal in his youth. At the beginning of the 90's, a meteoric rise propelled the young Latvian into the world's elite. At 22 Shirov already had an Elo rating of nearly 2750. Since then Shirov has been one of the best players in the world, delighting chess fans with original and amazing ideas.

System requirements: Pentium-Processor at 300 Mhz or higher, 64 MB RAM, Windows XP, Windows Vista, DVD drive, mouse, soundcard