We are quite sure that all of you studied basic geometry in your school days. Among the first few theorems you studied, there was one that said: sum of any two sides of a triangle is greater than the third. You believed it to be universally true, didn’t you? Well, let me prove that it is not true for some parts of your chessboard!
Let us consider the triangle formed by the squares a1, d4 and a7. If your King is sitting on a1, how many steps does it need to reach a7 walking along the a-file? Let us count: a2-a3-a4-a5-a6-a7, total 6 steps. Now let it go along the other two sides, a1-d4 and d4-a7, and count: b2-c3-d4-c5-b6-a7, total 6 steps again! Have I proved my point?
Some of you must be wondering what the point is in all this and others may be downright annoyed about such a silly proposition. But if you bear with us, we can tell you that keeping the above in mind can help you to tackle successfully many chess problems involving King and Pawn endings, either for a win or for a draw.
Take the simplest chess endings with a King and Pawn for both sides but positioned near opposite edges of the chessboard. You may have to follow a strategy of keeping options open for your King to move to either edge depending on the tactical plan of your opponent. The chess tactics for you will be to maintain a middle path till your opponent makes that critical move disclosing his plan and you can accordingly move your King to the required side.
The above diagram shows the principle behind such tactics. The square a7 can be reached in same number of steps from either a4 or d4 but if you need to move [...] Continue Reading…
Posted by on August 3, 2009 – 6:15 pm
I will keep this post short and sweet. I thought I will share this story with all my readers. Great end to a great game and Aronian won in a smooth style. Here is the link to the full story Aronian New Champ.
I will be posting some great tutorials in coming days.
In Working out Chess Combinations, you could work out an eight-move combination by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of both sides and to some extent worked your way backwards to find the moves that created the winning combination. But in the previous examples, there were quite a few pieces on board and the mobility, at least for some pieces, was restricted so that you could eliminate a good number of possibilities.
In the problem that we are posing now, there are only a few pawns and some heavy pieces on the board which is open to both sides for moving respective Queen and Rook. In fact, many beginners get daunted by such positions because they think that there are too many moves possible for their Queen and Rook and taken together with the responses from opponent’s Queen and Rook, the number of combinations may be overwhelming! Let us now examine if we risk getting bogged up in the maze of moves!
I do not have to say who has got the move because if it were White, this discussion would not be necessary. With Queen and Rook on the seventh rank, it is only a matter of two checks by the Queen to checkmate the Black King. But Black having the move, you have to be acutely aware that Black cannot let go of checks if aforesaid action by White has to be stalled. You should also note that in absence of Black Queen and Rook from their base rank, Rb8+ by White is enough to checkmate Black King.
If you consider Qc4+, you know that White Queen cannot interpose by Qe2 as in that case Rd1+ mates the White King (the Queen being pinned cannot capture the Rook). So only option for White is to move the King and e1 is [...] Continue Reading…
In the first article on Chess Tactics: Method Approach to Calculating Combinationson, we shared our ideas on how to proceed systematically for analyzing a situation for its inherent possibilities. The subsequent step is to work out our next sequence of moves which comprises a chess combination. The whole game of chess is expected to consist of many such nodal points where each node is planned (hopefully!) to yield some advantage, however microscopic it may be. In accumulating these advantages as we proceed from node to node, we expect at some stage to have enough to give us a win – well, that is the general idea!
While describing some suggested methods, we showed a simple example on how to put the ideas into practice. Continuing on the theme in Looking to find the best chess combination in a middle game position, we took up two slightly more complex positions and tried to apply the method for finding out the actual moves that were played over the board.
We will now examine another position and see how far our methods can help to reach the goals we seek. In the position shown below, Black has the move and we will try to figure out his best course of action.
You notice that in terms of material, White has a huge advantage because of his Queen against a Bishop. But look where the Queen is! Excepting for a support to the Rook at f1, a defensive role, it serves no useful purpose and could as well be not there on the board! White QB has become a bad Bishop, being blocked in by the White pawns in front and the QR position is no better. Only the KR has scope of some activity but, for now, it has taken away one escape square [...] Continue Reading…
In my view, all chess players get some inspirational ideas from time to time enabling them to produce that game of a lifetime! But since you will like to win on other days also, you cannot solely depend on that stroke of imaginative tactical ideas. You have to find some ways to make your perception work for you to produce, if not a brilliancy, at least a good combination or chess tactics whereby you get an upper hand over your opponent. In Chess Tactics: Method Approach to Calculating Combinations, we presented some methodical approach to find chess tactics that can yield better results on an average.
Lest you come to a wrong conclusion of this being a surefire way to create your combinations, we again stress that the method approach to chess tactics may not be possible for all situations by average players. In several earlier discussions, we have shown where even top Grandmasters could not find the winning move in a particular situation. You may go through Chess Tactics: The role of memory to see how Smyslov failed to find the move that enabled Chigorin to win in a similar situation 40 years earlier.
One of the reasons of failing to see some combinations is our mental block on certain possibilities. A Queen is such an important piece that we automatically assume that when the Queen is under attack by a Pawn/Knight/Bishop/Rook, the defender will try to protect it. That the Queen may have been marked for a sacrifice generally escapes our mind.
Let us see if the method approach would enable us to find the combination employed by Nezhmetdinov against Polugayevsky in the diagram position that was discussed in Importance of chess strategy – Part 2.
In the referred article, you have seen how the game proceeded after [...] Continue Reading…
