Chess giants #5: Stoofvlees double rook pawn attack against the French Tarrasch! TCEC Season 17.

GM Matthew Sadler and WIM Natasha Regan follow the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) as Season 17 unfolds. 10 superhuman-strength chess engines (6 traditional engines - such as Stockfish - and 4 neural net engines - such as Leela Zero) battle for qualification to the 100-game Superfinal match.
This is perhaps the finest game at the TCEC Season 17 so far - against pretty stiff competition! In a topical French Tarrasch line, Stoofvlees plays on both flanks, sacrificing a pawn on the queenside with b4 "Wing Gambit-style" to stabilise its centre before launching a kingside attack initiated - of course! - by the march of its rook pawn to h5! Ethereal defends desperately sacrificing a piece to break up White's centre but Stoofvlees converts its material advantage with deceptive ease.
You can follow the TCEC at https://tcec-chess.com/ Databases of games played in all previous seasons are to be found here: https://www.tcec-chess.com/archive.html
Matthew and Natasha's new book "Game Changer" came out on 20th January 2019 and won the prestigious ECF Book of the Year prize for 2019! The Game Changer chess book is available in print and digital versions from these links:
http://newinchess.com/game-changer (Paperback English edition)
https://forwardchess.com/product/game-changer (Digital)
https://www.chessable.com/game-changer-alphazeros-groundbreaking-chess-strategies-and-the-promise-of-ai-/course/19061/ (Digital)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9056918184 (Paperback and Kindle)
https://www.amazon.de/Zeitenwende-Schach-AlphaZeros-Bahnbrechende-Verheissungen/dp/9056918850 (Hardback German edition)

Matthew Sadler is a Grandmaster and 2-times British Chess Champion, ranked 41st in the world and 2nd in the UK on the December 2019 FIDE Rating List. He is the author of 7 chess books, 3 of which - The Queen's Gambit Declined and Chess for Life (also co-authored with Natasha Regan) and of course Game Changer! - won the prestigious English Chess Federation Book of the Year Prize.

Natasha Regan is a Women's International Master from England who achieved a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University. She has represented England internationally at both Chess and Go.
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