Working through McDonnell

After comments made by IM Jeremy Silman in January, I have grown more serious about looking through all of the games of a certain player. I started with Rezso Charousek (see "Redeployment"), ripping through all of his games (~180) in one week, then going slowly through many of them over the next month or so.

Preparing for my annual chess camp put me in another study mode, and I went through a healthy batch (~100) of the games of Adolf Anderssen, Paul Morphy's games at the First US Chess Congress, and returned to a collection of Vasily Smyslov's rook endings.

I'm now back in whole oeuvre mode with the games of Alexander McDonnell. ChessBase Big Database contains 110 games. I worked through the 35 that are not from his match with Louis Charles Mahe de la Bourdonnais over the course of two mornings.

The match games are interesting. I went through all the games of the first match quickly, then returned for a second pass. As I go through them, I am writing light annotations without turning on the engine.

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