My System

Aron/Aaron Nimzowitsch is famous for his work "My System" (originally published in German in 1925-27 by 
Verlag B. Kagan, Berlin), which he followed up with "My System in Practice" (1928) where he comments on 
his system in more detail. Both works have, in the course of time, been translated into many other languages 
and are considered to belong to the classics of chess literature.  

When you start studying a comprehensive work like "My system" you can either work yourself through
the book from the first page to the last, receptive to all ideas and details, or you can try to get yourself
an outline of the essentials, which these pages aim at doing.                   

                                                                Contents

Some important themes in "My system"

The Elements             Positional Play                           The Center                Type Positions
     
The Pawn Chain and The Qualitative Majority           Overprotection          Blockade     

Lavieren ("Luffing", Maneuvering)                              Post Script - The Revolutionary Theses

The Isolated Couple of Pawns - a Matter of Mobility

The Essentials 

The Chess Philosophy of A. Nimzowitsch: Prophylaxis and Mobility  

The Idiosyncracy of A. Nimzowitsch

Famous Sayings         Stylistic Peculiarities     Subject Index

Nimzowitsch and his contemporaries

The Neoromantic School  
The Conflict between Dr. Tarrasch and A. Nimzowitsch
The Relationship between A. Nimzowitsch and A. Aljechin/Alekhine
Gideon Stahlberg's opinion about Nimzowitsch
Rudolf Spielmann - Freindly towards Nimzowitsch 

Editor's Notes

About the Reception of "My system"
Critical Views on Nimzowitsch's Ideas
Nimzowitsch and the French Opening    
A Linguistic Comment on the Term “Isolani”
A Proposal for the Structure of Nimzowitsch’s System
Matrix of Structured Means and Goals
About Alternative Spellings of Names                               
Further reading on Positional Play - Past and Present        

Games

The Annotating Art of A. Nimzowitsch
Rubinstein-Nimzowitsch  (Marienbad 1925, an illustrative game)
The Immortal Zugzwang Game (Sämisch-Nimzowitsch, Copenhagen 1923)

Semmering 1926 (Photo)

Pictures courtesy Alan Cowderoy, Ludwig Karl, Wolfgang Kamm, Palle Mathiasen.

E-mail  Olle Ekengren      

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