Fearless Chess

If your opponent commits chess “crimes”, they need to punished. Sometimes the “trial” is long and the execution takes place in the endgame. Sometimes the crimes are misdemeanors and, if your opponent plays well after the crime, they are expunged from his record for good behavior. But if the crimes are numerous and serious, your opponent should be summarily executed right in the opening. Ignorance is no excuse for the laws of chess. Especially for a player rated 2100.

So what were White’s crimes? First, he didn’t castle when he had the chance and let his king get checked and forced to move. Second, he put all of his pawns on black squares and did not adequately defend the light squares. Third, he spent time chasing a meaningless pawn and moved a critical white-square defender to do it. And he committed all of these crimes in the first 14 moves. The law (Black) doesn’t take to kindly to such wanton disregard of positional rules. “On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long” (Emanuel Lasker). The next time you play, try to be the cop, not the crook.

When you are analyzing a combination during a game, sometimes your first go at it makes it seem as though it won’t work. Many chess books about tactics suggest that you then reverse the order of the moves in the combination to see if that helps. This is especially true if any of the moves are checks. Since checks are forcing moves, they can cause the flow of defensive pieces to be interrupted by king moves. When attacking, you should be especially careful not to “automatically” play recaptures. And if you are defending, don’t assume that pieces will be automatically recaptured. Always “check the checks” first. The players in these two games did not and suffered the consequences.

In the next game, White did the same thing: he saw a line that worked out well for him, and assumed Black would play it. He did not reverse the move order and was punished for it.

The lessons here? If you are under attack, there are so many ways things can go wrong. So you have to be hyper-sensitive to any threatening moves, especially checks and captures. And just because you stopped the original threat doesn’t mean you have stopped them all, or allowed new ones. And even if you checked a line before and found it to be safe, don’t assume it is still safe after your opponent’s next move. You have to re-check all lines after each new move. Each move can make subtle changes and create new threats or renew old ones. Defending is hard work. I reccomend attacking instead. But if you find yourself defending, always answer the question “What if he plays the second move first?”

Sometimes a game comes down to which player can see further ahead. After dodging a bullet in the middlegame (where he almost loses a rook after initiating a combination), White finds himself in situation where he has to see as many as ten dangerous moves ahead in order to decide on his next move, which is a very appetizing pawn push that he has been striving for most of the game. Black, too, is in a position where he can finally penetrate into White’s king position as he has been trying to do all game long. But to do so, he must also look far ahead and now allow White to make a nearly winning move. Whose move is more dangerous? Who can see further ahead? Who is right? Do you feel lucky?

The lesson here? Just because a player has a high rating does not mean that he is equally good at all aspects of the game. In this game, White initiated a combination which ended up losing him the exchange (and nearly a whole rook), and finished up by missing a mate at the end. Although I’m sure that his tactical ability is above average, he is probably more comfortable making positional decisions in quiet games. So if you are paired against a more highly rated opponent, you can always hope that you will match up well with him (i.e. your strength will be his weakness). Then the trick is to try to choose openings that create the types of positions you favor. In this game, White played a positionally-oriented opening (the English) and Black countered by selecting a more aggressive line (…e5 & …f5). In the end, as occurs in many a game, king safety was the deciding factor. If you are going to leave your king exposed, you have to ask yourself “Do you feel lucky?”

Sometimes you read about a neat trap in a book and you try to play it, but no one ever plays the right moves. Either they know about it and avoid it, or they don’t know about it and accidentally avoid it. But sometimes they fall right into it. And sometimes the trap has a bad line and a very bad line. This is an example of the very bad line.

If White could have read my mind, he would have said “Will you stop yelling ‘Please play 13. Nf3, Please play 13. Nf3′?” I’m not a big fan of opening traps, but I do like ones that come out of natural positions and are well hidden. And ones that my opponent falls for are the best of all.

In this game, Black falters in the opening a little, but recovers in time to get to an endgame without too much damage. Just when it looks like we’re in for one of those long rook endgames where both sides are trying to play offense and defense at the same time, Black drops his guard for a few moves and his king walks down a dark alley and never comes back.

A chessplayer has to be like a policeman and your opponent is the suspect. Even if you’re just stopping him for a speeding ticket, you have to be on high alert at all times. Maybe you’ve given out hundreds of tickets and every driver driver said “yes, sir” and “no,officer” and went on their way, the next one might be armed and dangerous. In chess, you may have played a hundred rook endgames and they all revolved around capturing your opponent pawns and queening your own, but the next one might involve a mating net and you might be the one caught in it. Be alert, because it’s never too late for mate.

If you study an opening long enough, and play through enough master games with that opening, and play a lot of games with it yourself, you start to get a feel for which moves are accepatable or playable within the framework of that opening. Such move are called “thematic” moves, or moves that follow the theme of the opening or position. Consequently, some moves played by your opponent will strike you as “nonthematic”, which is a fancy word for wrong. When you encounter such a move, you have to make a decision about the move. Is it A) a move that is known to be good, but with which you unfamiliar, or B) a move with which you are unfamiliar because it is a mistake no one has played before. If A, then keep playing and learn something new. If B, try to figure out why no one plays that move and refute it. In the following game, I think Black’s 12th move was a B move.

Well, it looks like I was right about 12…g6. Why was I so confident that it was a mistake and not a good move? Because I had studied and played this opening so much, I just could not believe that a good move existed that I had not run across in my studies, either of this particular line or any similar lines. How could I (and lots of GM’s) have missed it? We hadn’t. It’s was a mistake.
This goes to show you the value of studying an opening deeply and the value of playing over lots of master games in that opening. You develop a feel for what should and should not be tried. You get a sense of where to look on the board because you know how the pieces are related to each other. You start to know on which squares pieces belong and don’t belong. It makes it a lot easier to answer the question “What’s wrong with that move?”

Sometimes openings have certain positional or thematic goals that they wish to accomplish. For example, in the King’s Gambit (1.e4 e5 2. f4), one of the primary goals for White is to open the f-file and get play against the square f7 with a rook on f1, a bishop on c4, and perhaps a knight on g5. In the following game, Black plays the Sveshnikov Variation of the Sicilian Defense, a sharp, modern line with its roots in the Boleslavsky and Lasker-Pelikan lines. Black accepts some positional defects (weak d5 square and backward pawn on d6) in return for a stake in the center (e5) and the thematic pawn push, f5. Some of these theoretical ideas come with unspoken caveats, such as “Try to play …f5 (as long as your king is safely castled or at least your e-pawn is still on the board closing the e-file)”. Sometimes players forget about these small details and march ahead blindly towards their thematic goals. They do so at their own peril.

The lesson here? King safety has to become second nature to you. You have to develop a feel for it. You have to have a sense that things are opening up in the center and your king can’t stay there another moment, even if you can’t calculate an exact sequence that threatens your king. Players in many sports develop this sixth sense for safety (say that 3 times fast!). Football quarterbacks know that, when dropping back to pass, you can only hold the ball for so long (probably 5 seconds at most) before you have to throw a pass to someone or throw it away out of bounds. Trying to be a hero and “make something happen” may work sometimes, but more often than not ends in disaster (a sack and fumble or interception). Baseball players have to learn how big a lead they can take off of first base or whether they can stretch a single into a double or steal a base. There are examples in all sports.
The player of the Black pieces was no beginner, but even he failed to feel the danger to his king. Beginners, of course, succumb to attacks on their kings in the center all the time. They just do not see the benefit of “wasting” a move castling when they could be running around with other pieces (often the Queen) “doing” something. I believe a sense of king safety is more highly developed in players who like to conduct kingside attacks. That is, since they are always reaping the benefits of their opponent’s unguarded kings, they have a feel for when their own king is getting near that situation. If you find that you don’t have this feel for king safety, then just play it safe and castle as soon as you legally can in each game. Your king will thank you.

Sometimes you play games where things almost magically unfold before you, seemingly without any help from you. “Wow, that worked like a charm, didn’t it?”, you marvel at your amazing attack. Yet it did have help from you. If you play active, developing moves and look to create threats against weak spots in your opponent’s position, your pieces can develop a synergistic impact that you could not forsee at the outset. All your pieces seem to be on the perfect squares. In the following game, starting with move 18, Black just creates one simple threat after another, and suddenly finds himself in a won endgame, out of the blue.

What did White do wrong? Aside from 24. Qf2 which lost an additional pawn, it’s hard to say. Going backwards from move 26 (at which point White is officially lost), perhaps 17. h3 was a luxury White could not afford. Maybe 17. Rae1 would have prevented everything that happened. But it is really asking a lot for someone rated below 2400 to see all of that.
I think the lesson here is not what White did wrong, but what Black did right. By placing his pieces on active squares and creating simple threats, White pieces were forced to move in such a way that squares previously unavailable to Black became accessible, which allowed the creation of new, unforseen threats, which eventually became indefensible. You see the same thing in tennis: a player hits the ball to the right corner, then the left corner, then the right, and repeats that simple pattern until he gets a weak return or a lob that he can put away for a winner. No incredible, miraculous shots. Just good, solid shots into the corners can create a winning situation. Sometimes just sticking to the basics can yield great results “out of the blue”.

Sometimes a move has more than one purpose. And sometimes, the obvious purpose is so non-threatening, and relaxes your opponent so much, that he ignores your move and doesn’t look for any other, more hidden, threats. In the first game, White’s 59th move fits the bill.

Black just assumed he knew what the purpose of 59. Be8 was (trying to queen a pawn), and was not thinking about mate.
In the next game, White is thinking about mate, but gets so focused on bishop moves, he forgets to look at moves by Black’s other pieces. The key move here is black’s 29th.

The lesson here is that even strong players can be lulled into a sense of safety and neglect to perform a “blunder check” after each and every move. At it’s most basic level, a blunder check requires that you look at all checks and captures after each of your opponent’s moves and before you make your next move. In these two games, my opponents began to deal in ideas instead of specific moves. Just as in war, generals can shift troops strategically across the battlefield, but guns must have bullets, tanks must have gas, and troops must have food or any strategy moves are useless. You have to watch the details–every move, every game. You have to answer the question “Why did he play that?”

The following game is just an enjoyable little minature (micro-minature?) where a mate just fell into my lap right in the opening.

I guess that Black was so focused on his pawn-winning tactic, that he just forgot to evaluate the ensuing position. The lessons here are: 1) It’s not a good idea to initiate tactics in the opening before you have castled. 2) Whenever you are going to play a tactical sequence, you must analyse until you get to a quiet position (no checks or captures are left) and then evaluate that position. Not doing so can leave you open to an embarassing exit from the playing hall while everyone else is looking at you and wondering what happened.