Fearless Chess

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.

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.

Just as circumstances in one part of the world can affect events in far-flung places, moves on one side of the chessboard can have a dramatic effect on the other side of the board. In this game, White creates some threats on the queenside, but Black carefully arranges his pieces to cover everything. But then White nudges one piece on the kingside, Black chooses the wrong retreat square, and his position collapses like a house of cards.

It is interesting to note that Black, a well-known master from Maryland who has been rated as high as 2318, told me after the game that he had “never lost from this position”, referring to the position after 15…Qc6, which indicates he had a lot of experience with this opening (in order to get to a position 15 moves deep a lot of times). I think I may have thrown him off by combining elements of different lines into one game. I looked in a database and could find no instances of g4 played on move 16, as played in this game. I found 16. Qe2 and 16. Qf3, both of which were met by 16….d5. In this game, 16….d5 would have been met by 17. g5, leaving d5 underdefended by Black. In addition, I was unable to find any games with the move 19. Rb4, which seemed logical to me. So all of the individual moves I played have been played before, but perhaps not in that particular order.
The take home lesson here is that when playing a strong player, you have to know some opening theory to keep from getting beaten right at the beginning of the game. After that, you just try to play thematic ideas and hope you can catch him napping. Commenting on the book “Opening Preparation” by Dvoretsky and Yusupov, Tim Harding in an article on Chess Cafe says: “A note by Yusupov in the third illustrative game clearly contrasts with the kind of openings education I got in the 1960s where a typical remark was “Your only object in the opening should be to develop your pieces and get your king into safety for a playable middle-game”. That kind of advice may be good for the total beginner but is very misleading for any improving player with hopes of becoming an expert or master. Yusupov notes: “Modern opening structures are firmly linked to a middlegame plan of action…” (page 12) and “In essence, the entire game is an aggregate of mini-operations united by a general strategic idea that has its basis in the opening you have chosen”. In this game, the general strategic idea was to attack the king and, with the center basically closed, White’s mini-operations were: play on the queenside, then the kingside, win material on the queenside, then attack on the kingside. It doesn’t always work as well as it did in this game, but you have to go into the game with some knowledge and some kind of plan.

In this article, I am going to try something new, and I would like the readers to let me know if they like it. I wrote an article a while back called “Learning By Induction”
( http://www.chess.com/article/view/learning-by-induction ). In that article, I proposed that one could learn a skill better by WATCHING an expert do it rather than having an expert TELL YOU HOW to do it.

So I would like to try a little experiment. in this article, I will present 7 games (without any notes) all starting with Black using the same line against the Ruy Lopez. I am guessing that few of you have had any experience with this line, so it will make a good topic for the test. (You may recognise one game that I published in a previous article dealing with the attacking scheme used. I removed the notes for the purpose of this article). The test will be this:

1) Play through all seven games.

2) Try to determine the 3 main ideas for Black in this opening. They can be expressed along the lines of:
Black is trying to attack X
Black is trying to control square X
Black is trying to make White do (or prevent White from doing) X
Black is trying to do a certain thing with a certain piece or pieces
Black is trying to do things on X side of the board

3) Make notes as you play through each game and see if that idea or theme appears in any of the other games. That would be a good indicator that an idea is important (or important to avoid).

4) Write a comment listing your top three ideas for this opening. Write as though you were telling another person “Here are 3 things you need to do, prevent, avoid, or look for when playing this opening.”

5) Let me know if you found this exercise to be useful. Maybe I will do it again or not, depending on how it is received.

6) After a day or so (when enough comments are received), I will post a comment stating what I think the top 3 ideas are in this opening, so keep checking back to see if I have posted my “answers” yet. Perhaps you will come up with better ideas than I will (maybe I will cheat off of you!). Anyway, it should be interesting, entertaining, or educational. Maybe all three! Also, visit my website, www.brucetill.com , and be sure to click on the “Products” tab at the top and read about my new “Openings Club”.

Now send in those comments! Thanks!

The title of this article refers to the computer program BELLE, which was the first one to reach master strength (unlike now when they are all grandmaster strength or better), Boris Baczynskyj, a master who annotated one of BELLE’s games, and Arthur Bisguier, an American Grandmaster who was one of the USA’s top players (until Fischer showed up). I still see him at the US Amateur Team East tournament every year in February, and he still plays well. According to Wikipedia: “Arthur Bernard Bisguier (born 8 October 1929) is an American chess International Grandmaster, chess promoter, and writer. Bisguier won two U.S. Junior Championships (1948, 1949), three U.S. Open Chess Championship titles (1950, 1956, 1959), and the 1954 United States Chess Championship title. He played for the United States in five chess Olympiads. He also played in two Interzonal tournaments (1955, 1962). On March 18, 2005, the United States Chess Federation (USCF) proclaimed him “Dean of American Chess.” He is believed to have played more people, of all standards, than any other grandmaster in history”.
The first game was played by me against BELLE in the 1983 New Jersey Open (BELLE was created at Bell Labs in NJ and was entered in the tournament). The game was later analyzed in a book about computer chess. Pay particular attention to the note to Black’s 19th move. It’s a doozy! The second game was played by me against Bisguier in a simulataneous exhibition at a shopping mall in NJ in 1985. The interesting point is that both games started from an identical position beginning at move 20 (!). All of the improvements in the notes by Baczynskyj to the BELLE game were followed by Bisguier, except for one and it showed that they were all good ideas (of course, Bisguier generated all of the ideas himself, as the book had just come out (as if GM Bisguier needs a master to tell him what to do in a position he has probably played a million times in his life)).

The second game was played in a simutaneous exhibition in a shopping mall in New Jersey (Quakerbridge Mall). I was fortunate that Bisguier let me have White (in most simuls, the master takes White in every game in order to neutralize his disadvantage of having to run around from board to board). Then he played my favorite opening. What a sport!

Since it is relevent to the two games above, I am reprinting here an article I posted a number of months ago called “The Terminator Gets Terminated”. You can see how he did not follow the path of BELLE or Bisguier and got in trouble. You can also see how the two previous games gave me the experience I needed to correctly play that opening against a strong player.

William Morrison is one of the top players in Maryland. He is nicknamed “The Exterminator” for his “ability to process lower-rated opponents” (I read that somewhere). I presume that means he grinds them up like a food processor and points come out the other end. Although rated 2509 at the time of this game, we all know that a player’s rating is just an average measure of his ability to play all types of positions. A player can play some positions like a GM if he really studies and understands them. He can also play well below his rating if he is just making moves without a plan and waiting for mistakes from his opponent. I think that is what happened in this game.

White didn’t play any brilliant moves in this game, just as Black did not commit any blunders. But White, from much experience with this opening, stuck to a plan of maximizing his one advantage (his kingside majority of pawns), while Black did not do the same on the queenside until it was much too late. He also failed to trade off a key White piece (the rook), which dominated the endgame and was poised to deliver mate at the end.
The point is that, no matter what your rating is, you can be a master of a given opening or position through study. Players with high ratings have mastered more of these positions than you have. But once in a while you might get lucky and get into a position that you have mastered and they have not. When that happens, they are in for an unpleasant surprise!

These three games clearly illustrate my theory of “Learning By Induction”. By playing through these three games, you will give yourself a master’s understanding of the position arising from this opening. You could play the position from move 20 on with complete confidence that you know exactly what to do and what your opponent should be doing (or not doing). I had that confidence and knowledge and I drew a master strength computer program, drew a well-known grandmaster, and defeated a player rated 2509. This is how you get stronger at chess, you understand a little more each time you play through master games having the the same opening or same middlegame or same endgame. Play through enough examples and you will acquire a master’s understanding of those positions. Create a big enough “mental library” of “understood positions” and you will in fact become a master!

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.