Fearless Chess

It’s nice to win games by playing amazing moves, surprising tactics, and slashing attacks, but we all know that those are rare and that we can’t expect a steady diet of brilliant wins. It’s like the lottery. It would be nice to win once in a while (or ever!), but we need a reliable source of income. But how do we produce a steady income of winning chess games? We can’t always force things with crazy attacks, but then shifting pieces around endlessly waiting for blunders won’t work either. What we need is a method for generating a constant flow of winning chances. Not winning moves, winning chances. And what exactly are “winning chances”? Well, as the term suggests, they are points in the game where you have a chance of winning. Not the lucky, praying for a blunder chance, but the chance that your opponent will misplay a move and make his position a little worse and give you some sort of weakness to work on. Then, while defending that weakness, he will slip again and give you another advantage to work with. Depending on the severity of his errors, it may take one or two slips or it may take four or five to make the game irretrievably lost. The reason these are called “winning chances” is that there is no guarantee of winning. Your opponent may make one error and then recover and play good chess the rest of the way and render his earlier error inconsequential and arrive at an equal position. Even GM’s make errors and get into tough positions, but they pull themselves together and draw the game.

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.

In the following game, played in a simultaneous exhibition against a well-known senior master from Maryland, White plays a variation of the Bayonet Attack vs. the King’s Indian Defense, throwing in 9. Nd2 before 10. b4. A war is waged over control of the d6 square, after which, Black stakes all on his kingside attack and leaves the queenside to fend for itself. He comes within one move of delivering a brilliant checkmate on the kingside before White narrowly escapes with his life. The game illustrates how every move is judged by the questions “Do I need to play this move?” and “Does this move help my attack along?”

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!

As I noted in the previous article, “No Fire From This Dragon”, English GM Jonathan Mestel recalls receiving a telegram from the British Chess Federation at the World Student Chess Olympiad in Mexico City in August of 1977 that read “Miles says beware of American analysis of 13. Rdg1.” He said he had not the slightest doubt as to which position the telegram referred. It was the Soltis Variation of the Yugoslav Attack vs. the Dragon Variation of the Sicilian Defense.
In the following two games, White gets to try two different followups to 13. Rdg1 against the same opponent two years apart. Black helpfully duplicates his moves up to move 16, at which point White tries two different continuations. In the first game, the rook on g1 plays no factor in the attack due to the way Black played, but sometimes I think the move may influence the way Black plays. Just as some police never use their gun in 20 years, criminals may give up just by knowing that it could be used on them. Similarly, Black may allow the h-file to be opened just to keep the more sensitive g-file closed.

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 Dragon Variation of the Sicilian Defense has always been considered an enterprising, adventurous opening for Black. The Yugoslav Attack vs. the Dragon has always been considered the “acid test” of the variation and is one of the most heavily analyzed openings in chess, with entire books devoted to popular subvariations. This game follows main line theory until White’s little-played 13th move. Black’s response is not quite energetic enough and gives White the initiative, which, as is typical for this opening, proves fatal.

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.

One of the goals we aspire to in each game is to make every move count. That is, we want to make moves that threaten something or at least contribute to some objective. We try to avoid pointless moves that put our opponents under no pressure. But rarely do we play a game where we create threats and move forward almost from the beginning of the game to the end. This is just such a game. From his first threat at move 3 to the very end, Black presses forward with threat after threat until he wins material leading to a won endgame. Especially notice the remarkable sequence from moves 15 to 19, where Black plays 5 developing moves in a row, all with tempo.

The point of this game is that we should always try to make the best move possible. Don’t play moves that prevent non-existant threats, or make aimless developing moves just to make a move, or checks that are easily blocked and just waste time and misplace your pieces. Take time on each move and ask yourself “How does this move help me or threaten my opponent?” If you can’t come up with a good answer, maybe you should consider a different move. Things may seem to move slowly in chess, but opportunities are sometimes fleeting, so you have to stay alert and try to make every move count.