Fearless Chess

We have all had games where we knew we were winning, but we couldn’t seem to finish it off with a win. You play well enough to get to a position where you both know you are winning, but then he seems to play better or you play worse. You have play, but he has counterplay, and things just get complicated. You end the game (losing or drawing) thinking, “There had to be a way for me to win that. I know I was winnining. How did I mess that up?” The following two games illustrate how to avoid one of the easiest endgames in which one can throw away an advantage—the queen endgame. The first step is knowing that you should try to avoid a queen endgame by trading queens. Many players just start grabbing pawns and checking the king randomly with their queen while their opponent does the same and it’s just a big free-for-all. That is not how to win when you are ahead. That is how you draw when you are losing. The easiest way to win a queen endgame when you are ahead is to have (or create) a won king-and-pawn endgame and then trade queens. This presumes you can determine when a king-and-pawn endgame is won. Can you look at a position and say, “If the queens were gone in this position, I have a won game by doing X, Y, and Z.” If you can’t, you need to keep the queens on until you create a winning king-and-pawn endgame, or you need to study king-and-pawn endgames some more. In the first game, Black gets ahead by using the queen, and then finds a clever way to trade them off.

In the second game, Black sacrifices a pawn just to get the queens off, knowing that the resulting kind-and-pawn endgame is won for him.

In both games, Black realized that an extended queen endgame was not in his best interests, so he looked for a way to avoid it. Just knowing that helped guide him in creating a won king-and-pawn endgame. Also, a knowledge of how king-and-pawn endgames are won (creating passed pawns to either queen them or to deflect the opposing king from defending his pawns) is essential. So you can help yourself by learning the easy endgames and avoiding the hard ones. Then you will be known amongst your friends as the guy who always wins a won game.

I wrote an article called “Learning By Induction”, the main point of which was that a player could learn chess better by playing through the games of strong players and extracting for himself the lessons contained within them (inductive reasoning) rather than someone else telling you what to do in this or that situation, resulting in your head being full of a bunch of unrelated facts all out of context, which are hard to remember and apply (deductive reasoning). As an illustration of this, I present two new (i.e. not previously posted) games, as well as one game (previously unannotated) from an article I wrote called “There is Nothing New Under the Sun” (www.brucetill.com/Test/wp/blog/?p=7). I would like you to examine and compare the position of the first game after 13…d5 with the position of the second game after 17…Ne7 and the position of the third game after 15…cxd6 and see if you can extract any similarities amongst the three positions, especially with regard to the Black side.

That attack came out of a sharp line in the Ruy Lopez. The next comes from a nearly symmetrical position in the King’s Indian Defense.

The next attack comes from a classical King’s Indian setup. In the article mentioned above, this game went along lines almost identical to Taimanov-Najdorf, Zurich, 1953, which was awarded the brilliancy prize in that tournament.

In all three games, what common features did you extract? How about Black’s pawn chain pointing to White’s kingside? How about the half-open f-file? How about the transfer of pieces by Black to the kingside? How about the removal of all three pawns in front of the White king? How about Black’s disregard for material and focus on speed and attack, trying not to play a single unnecessary move? If you were able to learn these lessons “by induction”, then you can learn a lot more on your own by playing over master game collections in books. I would recommend Morphy and Alekhine myself. They were both great attackers, and as we all know, attack is much easier than defense.

The following game was played in Hagerstown (Maryland) City Park, once voted the “second most beautiful city park in America” (I presume Central Park in NYC is first). I was visiting relatives there, and we decided to go for a walk in the park. As we were walking back to the car, we stumbled across three people playing chess on a park picnic table. As one of them was watching the other two and not playing, I couldn’t resist asking him if he wanted to play. I assured my relatives it would not take long, since I assumed he would most likely not be nearly as strong a player as I. Much to my surprise, he trotted out 10-12 moves of theory. Perhaps this would take longer than I had anticipated. Perhaps not.

Luckily, I have a good memory, so as soon as we got home, I was able to write down all of the moves of the game. I don’t remember ever playing a game where I sacrificed a whole queen without having seen the end all the way to mate first. It was also lucky that my relatives were there to pressure me into looking for such a quick end to the game. I wonder how many brilliant games I haven’t played because I wasn’t looking for them? Perhaps we should all get in the habit of looking a little longer, a little deeper, and being a bit braver, even when the game does count. Fortune favors the brave, as they say.

Sometimes you start a game and wait for your opponent to castle so you know on which side to begin mounting your attack. But what if he won’t castle? What if he stays in the center and the center is closed? What do you do then? Sometimes a well-timed sacrifice can open the “closed” center.

In the next game, the Black king stays in the center not by choice, but because he was forced to move by a knight check. Nevertheless, he was protected behind a closed center which needed to be opened. Here, a knight sacrifice opens the floodgates to the king.

So you don’t have to give your opponent a pass if he stays in the center. It just requires a little creativity and a little boldness to figure out how to blast your way through the solid-looking cover. Once you do that, the rest is easy.

Not every attack ends in mate in under 30 moves. Some attacks go through phases, where goals are accomplished in parts and acheiving one goal leads to the creation of a new goal. This pattern may be repeated several times in one game. And tactics are the tools used to acheive goals. The following game has many phases of the attack, which does not end in mate, but rather an endgame in which White reaps the rewards of the goals he acheived througout the game.

So what were the phases of White’s attack? Can you name some? How about the attacking f7 with e6 and Ng5 phase, followed by the Qf2-h4 and Nf7 phase, winning a pawn. Then there was the line opening phase when White sacrificed two kingside pawns just to open lines for the queen and rooks. Following that was the redeployment of the knight that led to a tactic which won the exchange. That allowed the phase where White penetrated Black’s position with the queen and rook, forcing the king into the center. This enabled White to win Black’s knight with a tactic, putting him a whole rook ahead. The next phase was trading queens and the last phase was using the extra rook and White king to stop Black’s extra pawns.
Although White played a sharp opening line, he did not acheive a quick knockout. But he never let up on Black’s king and kept coming after it in phase after phase. Along the way, even though Black avoided mate, White piled up advantages (an extra rook), which he used to win the endgame. So while a mating attack that leads to mate is nice, a relentless attack in phases, each phase forcing some concessions from your opponent, can lead to just as satisfying a win.