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WHY AM I DOING THIS

In the autumn of 1996 I was playing in a tournament in my chessclub in Moscow. I was 14 years old at this point, school was pressing hard on me, I was seriously thinking about finding a good moment of quitting chess in the nearest future. After I finished one of the games, one of our coaches, FM Boris Gruzman took me to his study and mysteriously told me that we had to talk about something. He offered me to become a student of Iosif Davidovich Berezin. This offer has changed my chess life dramatically;  I think this was probably the moment when I started to study chess seriously for the first time in my life. The study method that I.D. Berezin used while working with his students was completely different from what I had been used to. The only thing that we were doing was annotating our games and then going over them. We did not study tactics, nor endings nor openings. Just annotating games. And yet I found this method to be very effective: by analyzing deeply their games the students, including myself were able to see all aspects of the game from a different point of view. All ideas that we learned in chess were closely associated with our own games, not the games of some GM's. This kept my interest to the game: I did not quit chess in 1996, but I continued to play it and am still playing this game! 

In 1998 I left Moscow and for the last 2.5 years have been living in Vancouver, Canada. Since then I had little motivation to annotate games. However, the possibilities that the Internet gives to all of us, as well as the importance of the tournament that I played in (not very well, alas), gave me a stimulus to go ahead with this project...

HOW I AM DOING THESE NOTES

Well, probably not much to explain, you can see everything by yourself, and yet some points I thought should be clarified.

1) I tried to use computer playing programs as little as possible. It is dangerous to allow Fritz do the work for you - one of the key purposes of annotating games is to develop analytic skills. However, sometimes, when giving evaluation in the end of the line I tried to confirm it with Fritz. If we both thought that the position is "+-", this made me feel a bit more confident.

2) Help from humans was quite helpful, and much more instructive for me than that from PC's. Irwin Lipnowski was occasionally looking at the games as they were played. His observations of the key moments were quite useful for me when thinking of these games. He also did go over the games with me when there was time the night after it. Another person who also helped me greatly is Sergei Sokourinski. We spent a couple of nights with him at the analysis of games here in Vancouver. Notes to games from rounds 3, 4 contain a lot of his ideas. Jean Hebert also once looked at one of my games (round 10).

3) Analysis is a shaky thing. Mistakes are inevitable. Please tell me if you spot any, I would greatly appreciate this!

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