Occasionally, however, our opponent plays a move that we have never seen before. At first, we are insulted by his impudence: “That’s not a move!”, we yell without speaking. “I know this opening inside out and I have NEVER seen that move, so it CAN’T be any good!” But after the initial contempt for the move fades, we get down to the task of formulating our required reply. Can we just ignore it and continue to play as we usually do against the “correct” move? Is it a trap? Does it contain some sort of threat? Or is our “uneducated” opponent merely unaware of the motifs of this opening and is simply “making it up as he goes along?” As we continue to analyze the move, we notice that perhaps it does have some point to it. It may allow him to persue ideas that are normally not available to him in this opening. Maybe he has studied this line inside and out. Maybe (perish the thought!) he knows more about this opening than we do. Maybe HE has scored dozens of wins with this opening. Maybe we have entered HIS backyard!

All of these emotional undercurrents can cause us (and even Grandmasters) to react poorly to such a move. That is why it helps to have a mental checklist onto which we can fall back when we are confronted by a new move in the opening. Such a checklist will help us clearly evaluate the pros and cons of the new move and come up with an appropriate reply, rather than lashing out with the first move that pops into our heads.

Checklist For Replying To A New Move

1. Does the move threaten something immediately?
A check? A capture? A fork? If so, this threat needs to be dealt with right away. Don’t miss anything obvious just because you are surprised by a new move.

2. What is the normal move in this position and what is it’s purpose?
Does the new move accomplish this purpose as well, or does it allow you to play a shot that is not normally possible? Sometimes this elementary question can instantly lead you to the correct reply. For example, if the normal book move prevents you from playing a very unpleasant pin that you were threatening and the new move does not, maybe you should just play the pin and gain an immediate advantage.

3. Is the new move designed to prevent you from playing a key move in normal line?
Sometimes the purpose of a new move is merely to prevent you from playing a string of book moves and to steer you into a new or less well known position. This new position may be objectively worse for your opponent than the main line, but he is hoping to throw you off. In this case, there must be a reason that this new move is not the main line. Perhaps it takes too much time. If the new move is a pawn move, maybe it leaves you too far ahead in development. If the main line is for him to castle, maybe the new move allows you to open lines and attack. Instead of trying find out what the moves DOES, find out what it DOESN”T do. In other words, sometimes you need to look at the hole instead of the doughnut.

In the following game, White’s fifth move comes as a surprise to Black. Not seeing any particular threat in the move, he continues as per the normal line. After making some preliminary arrangements of his pieces, he seeks to exploit a perceived drawback to the new move. White plays somewhat passively and allows Black to build an attacking position, which, with the help of some tactical strokes, crashes through for the win.

The lesson here is that when you are confronted by a new move, you need to:
1) Remain calm and don’t respond quickly or emotionally.

If you think responding quickly will upset your opponent by making him think you have seen the move before, or you think that taking time to analyze the move will encourage him by letting feel as though he has stumped you, you are wrong. A quick, dumb move will encourage him, but a well thought out move and follow-up plan will upset him.

2) Try to find out what the new move is designed to do.

Any move, even ones that are proven to be bad by good play, usually has some threat and will be effective against poor play that does not respond to that threat. Don’t fall victim to simple traps just because they are new to you.

3) Try to remember what the purpose of the normal move is.

The normal or book move is usually the book move because it is thought to be best in that position. Other moves can range from game-losing blunders that can be defeated in one move to mere variations in style, with effectiveness equal to the book move, but requiring a different plan to combat. Don’t dismiss a new move, but don’t fear it either. Calm analysis will guide you to the best reply.

So once again, the steps for saving a losing game are: A) Realise you are in trouble, B) Stay calm, C) Solve real problems, and D) Look for counterplay. The sooner you realise that you have made a mistake, the more options you will have for dealing with it. Just burying your head in the sand and hoping your opponent won’t capitalize on your errors won’t work. A bad plan is better than no plan at all. So just do it.

The lesson here is that even losing material can result in new advantages. In this game, White captured Black’s pawn on h3, which (after White’s h- and g-pawns disappeared), resulted in an open h-file for Black’s queen and rook. Also, the white-squared bishop that White used to capture Black’s rook was defending the weak white squares around his king. Once it was gone, Black was able to exploit those squares. Black was in a position to utilise his new advantages much more quickly than White could use his extra rook. Black realised this and even sacrificed a knight to create maximum counterplay. The old saying is true: look at the pieces on the board, not off the board, to see if you are winning. It’s not what’s been captured that matters, it’s what’s left and what you do with it.

1) Put on a poker face. That is, don’t let your expression show that you are upset or even that you know you have made an error. Sometimes your opponent doesn’t even look for your error unless you tip him off with a sad face. Or they see the error, but don’t know if it was a mistake or a trap, since you look so calm.

2) Evaluate your position to see exactly how bad it really is. Sometimes when things don’t go your way, or when your opponent plays an unexpected strong move, you get depressed, which leads you to believe that your position is now hopeless, when, in reality, there is just one problem that can be dealt with, or you have counterplay that you may not have noticed right away. Let initial panic be replaced with calm analysis.

3) Solve the biggest problem first. If your opponent is threatening mate in one, you have to deal with that immediately. If he is only threatening to double your pawns, you have more options.

4) Look at the unique features of your position. Continuing with the doubled pawns, you could prevent the doubling or perhaps put a rook on the soon to be opened file. Or ignore it altogether and make a move that promotes your counterplay. Think about exactly what would happen if your pawns got doubled. Maybe you are just thinking about standard chess advice like “Doubled pawns are bad” instead of looking to see if they are bad IN THIS EXACT POSITION. There are often unusual configurations of pieces in a position that make standard chess advice irrelevant. Look for those unique counter chances.

5) Never underestimate the role of overconfidence. How many times have you been way ahead in a game only to get lazy and miss a shot from your opponent that turns everything around? So why can’t you be the one delivering the shot this time? Maybe he’ll be the one to get lazy or overconfident or hallucinate and blunder. You need to stay in a good, alert state of mind to see such game-changers.

6) Fighting back often upsets your opponent. You made a mistake and lost material and, objectively, he has a won game. You know it, he knows it, the onlookers know it, your computer knows it. So you will play a few more moves and give up, right? No. Make him show you that he knows how to convert his advantage into a win. He’s not a GM or a computer. If you can make a mistake, so can he. Of course, losing a whole queen for nothing is just about impossible to come back from, but losing a pawn or the exchange is not the end of the game. Some people get nervous when they are winning because they keep thinking about not messing up instead of winning. Or they trade down so much material, that they make the win harder instead of easier. Sometimes the only way to cash in an advantage is to attack and some players are no good at that. Or the only win is in an endgame, and they are bad at endgames. Make him show you he knows what he is doing. Don’t help him out by resigning out of anger or playing dumb moves.

In the following game, Black gets too many ideas in his head and plays all of them at the same time, which invariably leads to trouble. At one point, he realises that he is getting in trouble, analyzes the position, decides exactly what is wrong, deals with it, finds some counter chances, then White panics and ends up losing a rook. Then White finds counter chances, but Black is able to find a shot that takes the full point.

So the lesson here is to A) Realise you are in trouble, B) Stay calm, C) Solve real problems, and D) Look for counterplay. Sometimes a good attitude is worth more than a good move.

In the first example, Black’s pawn on h7 is attacked and Black makes the ill-advised decision to protect it by playing 13…g6, blocking the diagonal instead of 13…h6, moving it off the diagonal. This minor decision has major consequences as White exploits the weak dark squares around the king.

In the second example, Black plays the opening well, but in the middlegame, he decides to prevent a move by White that would have been mildly annoying by creating a permanent, serious weakness in his own position that White is able to utilize for the rest of the game.

In the third example, from Grandmaster play, White sacrifices a pawn for the sole purpose of weakening the dark squares around Black’s king. Black valiantly tries to cover the weakenesses, but White brilliantly finds a way to penetrate Black’s defenses.

The lesson of these three examples is clear: do not create a weak square complex in front of your king and then trade away defenders of those weakenesses. Conversely, if your opponent creates a weak square complex in front of his king, notice it, get rid of defenders, and exploit it. Having your queen and a bishop of the proper color will be extremely helpful in taking advantage of this weakness.

So how does one improve his ability to evaluate positions? One method that I find useful is to play over master games that are annotated by a master, preferably the master who won the game. In the annotations, he will relate what he was thinking and why he played as he did. Playing over master games that use the openings that you use is even better. You will get a feel for what is right or wrong in certain opening positions, as well as the resulting middlegames. In the game above, I had never seen the maneuver 10…Ba6, 12…Nxa6, 13…Nc7 in any of the dozens of games I had played over from books, as well as games I played myself over the board. This does not necessarily constitute proof that a move or sequence is bad, but it certainly makes you think a little longer about what might be wrong with it and how you can exploit it. In other words, you are in a position to EVALUATE the move as wrong and the position as better for you and know why. In this game, I evaluated the position of the knight at c7 to be wrong because it did not participate in the struggle for e5 as it normally does from the usual squares d7 or c6. Also, never having seen …f6 played to kick the knight off of e5, I evaluated that move as an error due to the weakening of e6. If Black had made the same evaluations BEFORE playing those moves, he probably would not have made them at all. But his calculations seemed to be of the nature “My white-squared bishop is bad. Get rid of it.” “The knight on e5 is strong. Kick it out with f6.” While this is an improvement over much lower rated players, who often do not even have any concept of a piece being “bad” or “strong”, as the rating of one’s opponents goes up, so does the depth and subtlety of the evaluations. For example, A GM may dismiss a certain pawn capture on move 6 in the opening with a comment like “This is bad because it gives Black a lost endgame.” And one might wonder how he can make such a comment on the endgame when it only move 6. What he means is that now Black is compelled to win the game in the middlegame, since he has eliminated any recourse to an equal endgame by having damaged his pawn structure on move 6.

Improve your evaluation skills by playing over master games and your rating will go up. Trust me.

So what is the “method” for generating winning chances? You need to ask your opponent questions. Not out loud, of course, but with your moves on the board. What do I mean by “questions”? A question is when you make a move and your opponent has to make a decision. It can be as serious as threatening mate in one or as common as a capture after which he has two ways of recapturing. Any series of poor decisions can lead to a lost position or they can lead to a poor, but defendable position. The point is that you must, as often as possible (it’s not possible to make every one of your moves into a tough question), make your opponent answer a question about how to continue. This means your focus on each move must be on generating IDEAS. Ideas about how to create some sort of plan to gain some kind of advantage. It can be as simple as pinning a knight and threatening to double his pawns. It can be a plan to open a file and then double your rooks on it. The main thing is to never run out of IDEAS. As soon as you run out of ideas, either propose a draw or resign. Ideas are how you generate questions for your oppnent to answer, questions that he can get wrong. And every wrong answer adds to your increasing advantage until the position is too far gone to hold, at which point there are no correct answers and all moves lose.

Where do we get ideas? From playing over master games, both old and new. After a while, you will find yourself thinking during a game: “I remember a game by Morphy where he had a position like this and he did such-and-such and ended up with a big attack.” After checking for particular neccessary similarities in your position, you try it, and it works! Just as it did in the Morphy game. Sometimes you can synthesize two or three ideas from two or three different games into one grand plan in your own game. Master games are a goldmine of great ideas.

In this game you should notice that White didn’t play any incredible, wininning-on-the-spot moves. He just made moves that made his opponent make decisions, and he made a number of bad ones. But at each point, until near the end, he could have played better and recovered. The point is he was CHALLENGED to hold the game. White constantly came up with IDEAS to force Black to ANSWER A QUESTION. White didn’t always play the “computer move” that was 0.03 points better than the move in the game, or the “book” move that all of the GM’s play. Maybe computers and GM’s can see through all of your threats, but can your opponent? You have to ask him the questions. He can’t give the wrong answer to questions you don’t ask. The reason GM’s are GM’s is that they ask tougher questions and when asked, give better answers than you or I. But even at our level, we can concentrate on forcing our opponents to earn a draw or a win, not just hand it to them by making aimless moves.

If you are going to play the King’s Indian Defense as Black, you have to have the mindset of being committed to your kingside attack. Halfway attacking gestures, unnecessary defensive moves on the queenside, and fearful moves just don’t cut it. You’re either going to attack and play for mate or you’re not. If you don’t like attacking, play the Queen’s Gambit. The main idea you have to keep in mind is this: “If his queenside attack works, he wins material. If my kingside attack works, I checkmate him.” That thought will give you courage as your queenside gets decimated. Think of his captures of your material as a good thing, that is, he is spending time over there and giving your attack more time to develop over here. Time is the important thing, not a rook on a8 that is contributing nothing to the attack. Walt Whitman expressed the feeling in his poem, Pioneers, O Pioneers (currently being used in the Levis Jeans “Go Forth” commercials):

COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

In the second game, I try a suggestion that I saw in the notes to another move in a book on the Soltis Variation. It really unleashes the rooks on g1 and h1.

So while I can’t claim that 13. Rdg1 is the winning move against the Soltis Variation, it does create certain opportunities for White not available to him in other lines. And if White is familiar with these motifs and Black is not, they can form a potent surprise to the unprepared Dragon player.

The Soltis Variation of the Dragon Sicilian (12. h4 h5) is often a tough nut to crack, so White needs to have a few tricks up his sleeve to get the job done. In this game, 13. Rdg1 worked like a charm, not because it is objectively best in that position, but because Black did not respond to the move well and played moves designed to combat the main line move 13. Bg5. This just goes to show that sometimes just a slight deviation from the norm is enough to throw some players off of their game and swing the balance in your favor. It’s a lot like a drag bunt in baseball or an option pass in football. They aren’t the best plays in the book, but they often work because they are unusual and catch the opponent off guard. A little research in the books to find such moves can pay off again and again.