Recent Miniatures in the Ruy Lopez by GM Magesh and GM Arun

This week we shall see some of the more recent miniatures in the Ruy Lopez. Although this system has been played and analysed extensively in the last couple of centuries, it still has so much life in it that even super Grandmasters are not completely confident of what is going on.

When we look at old games we can easily find a lot of miniature games since at that time, theoretical knowledge was limited and an average tournament player was out of his opening theory after 6-7 moves. But in modern times, everyone has access to extensive theory and many Grandmasters manage to pull out strong novelties even at move 30.

Our first game is between Edouard and Tkachiev from the French Championship 2010. Black played a rare system on move 5 and quickly got in trouble after his 8th move. 

It was a fantastic finish from white as he never gave Black any chance to get back into the game. After 12. e5!! the game ended pretty quickly. Our next game is Howell-Nielsen, NH Chess Tournament 2010. In this game Anand's trusted second, Nielsen, came up with a not-so-popular move against the exchange Ruy Lopez. After leaving his opening preparation, he soon landed in trouble and was unable to recover.

In both games Black tried to play rare lines and quickly got in trouble. Probably miniatures wouldnt exist if no one was ready to play such lines and try new interesting ideas. Chess itself is large enough to find so many interesting ideas even in well-played and thoroughly-analysed systems like the Ruy Lopez. We are sure that the Black players will fight back with these rare systems by introducing new ideas. We hope that the readers enjoyed these short games, that we were amazed to see in the Ruy Lopez system in top level chess.