Raymond Keene

Fabian strategy

issue 11 October 2014

Good news. Fabiano Caruana will be coming to London this December to participate in the sixth London Classic. This will be a great privilege for the London audience since Caruana is, in my opinion, now creating the best, most exciting, most aggressive and most accurate chess that we have seen since the glory days of Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. In Standpoint’s current issue, Dominic Lawson, former editor of The Spectator, praises ‘Caruana’s astonishing and seemingly natural ability to calculate’ combined with his ‘immense aptitude for hard work’.

This week’s game between Caruana and a former Fidé (World Chess Federation) champion ranks as one of the most impressive I have ever seen. To outplay such an illustrious opponent from a virtually symmetrical opening, to gradually encroach on his territory and to conclude with the magnificent flourish of a sensational sacrificial mating sequence is little short of chessboard perfection.

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