Fearless Chess

As you might gather from the title of this article, some players do not seem to be aware that the loss of a single pawn in the opening, without obtaining any visible compensation for it, is enough to lose a chess game. This probably stems from the fact, that when beginners play each other, the errors from both sides come fast and furious, making the outcome of the game seem almost random, and that certainly the loss of a mere pawn can have little bearing on the final result. Of course, the player of the Black pieces in this game was no beginner and was well aware that he was losing, as he had a USCF rating of nearly 1600. I chose this game, however, to illustrate the point because the postion after the loss of the pawn was very simple and the game is a good example of how White inexorably marches to a won endgame by trading pieces and limiting counterplay.

The point of this game is not that you should never sacrifice a pawn. I have sacrificed whole pieces and won games easily. It’s just that you have to get something in return (like a mating attack) as compensation (as outlined in the notes to the game). The point is that you can’t lose material for nothing and expect to win. Conversely, if you win material, even a lowly pawn, and incur no disadvatage for doing so, you can, with proper technique, fully expect to win the game. So let’s have a little respect for those pawns!

While I’m all in favor of playing aggressively, I try to do by playing an aggressive opening as White. And when I’m playing Black, I try to play aggressively after I have equalized and gotten a few pieces developed. However, choosing an opening (as Black) that is known for it’s somewhat drawish tendencies and then launching into a hyper-aggressive continuation starting with move 11, is over doing it a little bit. It’s like starting a bar fight with someone. There are a lot of variables to consider. How good is my first punch? Is he bigger than me? Is he standing next to a bowling trophy that he can use as a weapon? How close am I to the door if this gets out of hand? You can hardly be surprised if it backfires on you.

Black could have headed for the exit with 14…Qe8, which would have calmed everything down, but instead, he dove into the pile and came out with a little more than a black eye. The moral of the story is to know what you are getting into before turning an even position into a fist fight. Or better yet, stay out of bars and stick to chess clubs.

In part 1 of this article, I showed a game where the kingside attack was conducted using pieces to open up the pawn cover on Black’s kingside. In part 2, I show a game with the same exact opening where White uses a pawn storm to accomplish the same idea.

Note how White never stopped trying to open lines against the Black king. Even though White never acheived his primary objective of opening the h-file, Black had to make concessions in order to keep it closed, and they allowed White to force the g-file open, with equally deadly effect. Sometimes you can’t tell ahead of time which file will become open, because the pawn structure on the kingside is still flexible and can prevent the opening of a given line. In that case, you have to threaten to open one file, force your opponent to close it, and take advantage of the resulting inflexibility of the pawn structure to force open a different line and then proceed to regroup your pieces and work with the new open line. It’s a rare case when everthing goes according to plan. It’s like painting a picture in which your opponent gets paint every other stroke. You just have to incorporate his stokes into the picture and still try to create a masterpiece.

When you have to drive somewhere you have never been before, there are two types of people. One type gets a map and plots a route to the destination, prints out driving directions from the computer, or uses a GPS navigator. The other type relies on a few verbal directions from someone who went near there a few years ago or maybe even says “I have a good sense of direction. I’ll find it”, and relies solely on the fact that the destination “is North of here”. When it comes to chess openings, I’m the first type. I always read a book before I play a new line or if my memory needs refreshing about a line I haven’t played in a while. In this game, I had looked at the map, while my opponent just followed his nose.

When I say “read a book”, I don’t mean I memorize every line, cover to cover. I get out a chess set and start to play over the line, and at certain points I stop and ask myself, “What am I going to play if he plays this move, because that looks pretty obvious, so I had better have something ready against that.” The motivation is to not waste time on the clock trying to reinvent the wheel if my opponent plays the main line or some other reasonable move. I can just look it up in a book at home and save lots of time, look smarter to my opponent, and even learn something about the general ideas of the opening. I pick the openings I like, I buy books about them, select the lines or variations that I choose or my opponent may choose, and I try to find a line with which I am comfortable. You don’t have to know every side street like a cabdriver, but you have to at least know the main streets of your openings. It helps your game, saves time on the clock, and boosts your confidence right at the beginning of the game.

In games where the players castle on opposite sides, an attack against the opposing king is almost always in order. The rational for this is “If you don’t do it to him, he’s going to do it to you” or, if you like, the more pithy “Kill or be killed”. In this game, it was White who really took this advice to heart.

This game illustrates the cardinal rule of opposite side castling: “Make threats quickly and keep them coming”. From move 12 on, White created threat after threat and Black never even got going on the queenside. It also shows that the old saying “Count the pieces on the board, not off the board.” is true. Although White was behind by a knight and rook “off of the board”, he had an abundance of material where it counted “on the board”, namely, Black’s kingside.