Almasi Conquers The Center | Launching 100+ Modern Masterpieces Guaranteed To Improve Your Chess

Today, I'm doing something INCREDIBLY stupid... I'm launching a MASSIVE new series on my YouTube channel: "100+ Modern Positional Masterpieces Guaranteed To Improve Your Chess"

My previous greatest effort on my blog and YouTube channel has been my series on "The Best Chess Games Of All Time" - a decade by decade look at the greatest games in chess history. It was a hugely rewarding project for me personally, digging into over 130 games from a century of chess, taking a fresh look at the most famous games in chess and also finding some truly rare gems.

2025 marks the quarter of a new century, and celebrating it has motivated me to look in a fresh direction—modern masterpieces. In many cases, I think these recent gems are less known than games from 100 years ago. The advent and ubiquity of the engine drives many to take a surface look at games, seeing only which moves were "right" or "wrong". The ideas behind both players moves can often be overlooked; accuracy can be celebrated over genius and creativity. This also often means the only the games of the very top players are celebrated.

While I wanted to look at modern masterpieces, I didn't want to just look at beautiful and sacrificial games. I wanted to focus on instructive games, and ultimately, I decided to create a complete chess course based on these games. This course should cover everything you need to know from the opening to the endgame with each game illustrating a particular theme. Whether you only know the basic rules and want a course that gives you a complete modern roadmap to strategy OR you are an experienced play, excited to see fresh strategic brilliancies, I believe you will find a lot to love in this series. It's been extremely rewarding and satisfying pouring over games from this quarter century, and I hope you enjoy these games and themes as much as I do!

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Naturally, we begin the series by looking at the opening, and the first thing one must do in any game is "Control The Center".

The center is the "high ground" in chess—the four squares in the middle of the board: e4, d4, e5, and d5.

Pieces can utilize the center to easily move to any part of the board. Pieces in the center typically also have more mobility, controlling more squares.

It's important to note that pieces IN the center, don't always CONTROL the center because pieces don't control the squares on which they stand. Be wary of occupying the center too quickly with your pieces.

In most cases, you want to establish control of the center with pawns at the very beginning of the game. In some cases, players may not occupy the center with pawns right away, instead, they may opt for rapid development of pieces that target the center, and LATER these pieces can support pawn advances to attack the center.

In today's game, we see what happens when GM Gadir Guseinov abandons the center, hoping GM Zoltan Almasi will overextend in taking it. Instead, Guseinov is blown out of the water thanks to determined and vigorous sacrificial play by Almasi.