A game

This was just insane stuff. I don’t usually play like this.

…Though perhaps I should (play like this). Piece sack. Pawn sack. Rook sack. Mate. Nice! Yes, I know, 20…Qa3+, 21.Qa2 Nc2# was even faster but it was a 10 min game and you can’t get everything right.

After 19.Na4 the mate cannot be stopped but white is in deep trouble long before that point is reached. True, he isn’t completely dead after 19.Qc2, a difficult move to play, but after …Nxc2 20.Kxc2 Qb6! he’s still losing another piece. The fact that a move like that is necessary illustrates just how strong the black attack is, even though only relatively few pieces are involved. White can’t protect both the knight on c3 – which will be lost after 21…Qxb3+ and 22…Qxc3 – and the bishop – which is hanging if 21…Qxf2+ can’t be followed by 22.Rd2. It’s not completely lost as black gave a lot of material for the attack, but black should be winning after i.e. 19.Qc2 …Nxc2, 20.Kxc2 Qb6, 21.Rhf1…Qxb3+, 22.Kd2 Qxb2+, 23.Ke3 Qxc3 or 21.Rb1…Qxf2+, 22.Kc1 Qxg2, 23.Rd1 Qxh3.

So when did it go wrong for white? I think 14.Nxe6 was definitely a very risky move to play. But then again so was 0-0-0 after he’d played Bxc5 – he hadn’t even started his attack on the king side yet and I already have a rook in the half open b-file. When a player decides to go ‘all in’ for the attack on the enemy king even small inaccuracies grow large very fast; one move wasted can lose you the game.

Part of why I played like this is that I’m currently reading Jacob Aagaard’s Attacking Manual 1. It has made me a little less scared of rushing into quite complicated positions – I’ve even started playing the King’s Gambit on a semi-regular basis online (even though I haven’t given up the Petroff..).

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April 28, 2011 - Posted by US | Chess

5 Comments »

Congratulations on the great game and the sound post-mortem analysis.

To the extent that “where did it go wrong” analysis is helpful – which I find to be “not very” except for pretty immediate blunders – I think the 0-0-0 was the move that spelled if not immediate defeat then a middle game committed to defending for white. The circumstances where it’s justified to castle into a semi-open file are very limited, and that was definitely one of them.

Comment by Plamus | April 30, 2011 | Reply
Jeg ville bare lige vise dig det her:

http://www.primalbody-primalmind.com/blog/?p=1117

Comment by Ulla Lauridsen | April 30, 2011 | Reply
Plamus:

As I wrote in the post, I agree that 0-0-0 was not optimal given Bxc5.

I like to learn from the ‘subtle mistakes’ rather than just the blunders, because I consider blunders to be ‘failures from not thinking’, whereas the ‘subtle mistakes’/wrong paths chosen are ‘mistakes from thinking the wrong way’. I rarely lose against good players because of blunders, rather they just keep finding better moves. I want to know how to find those moves too and figuring out how to avoid playing obvious blunders alone isn’t going to help me much with that.

Ulla:

Tak for heads-up. Hvis resultaterne kan reproduceres og giver tilsvarende resultater blandt menneskelige forsøgspersoner vil vi sandsynligvis se ændringer i behandlingspraksis.

Comment by US | April 30, 2011 | Reply
US, I apologize if this is off mark, but it seems to me that you take a, so to say, Botvinnik approach to chess. You look for an objective way to win. Nothing wrong with that, but for me personally there is little fun in that. We are probably already at the point where a human cannot beat a computer that way anymore. I take, to continue the analogy, a more Tartakower approach – it’s not he/she who plays well that wins at chess, but he/she who plays better. Moves that are proven unsound after weeks of analysis win games. Deep Rybka is objectively better than Nakamura, yet he finds ways to “surprise” it, knock it off its comfort zone.

That’s also probably why I rarely play time controls higher than 3 min anymore. I like a fast-paced battle conducive to mistakes.

There is no right and wrong side here. Just like the eternal military contradictions between more armor or more “firepower”, or pitched battle against guerrilla warfare, you can win either way.

Comment by Plamus | April 30, 2011 | Reply
It’s not off the mark at all.

When I started playing chess a little more seriously than I used to – after high school but long before I became a member of a club (I’d played a little in HS and such but didn’t work systematically with it at all and I was still pretty much a beginner when I started at the university) – I did it by playing a lot of games against a computer program. I did this before I started playing regularly against human opponents because I didn’t like to lose to a human, whereas it was no problem losing to the machine, and also because I thought the computer was a much better teacher because it forced me to keep on finding the ‘correct chess moves’ so to speak, and I knew the machine would immediately punish incorrect moves and show me why they were no good. I don’t play much against the computer any more but I still use it when analyzing and when doing opening preparations.

I’m a systemizer (also?) when it comes to chess. I like to know the system I’m playing, the main ideas, how to proceed. Don’t get me wrong, some players play just one or two openings and basically play the same games with a little variation over and over for decades; I’m not like that, I have a reasonably big repertoire and I like to experiment and try out new ideas. However I do want to have some knowledge about which are the objectively best moves in a given opening and I want to be able to play them, because if I’m able to do that I won’t lose as quickly/easily. I dislike unfamiliar terrain, it makes me uncomfortable, uncertain as to how to proceed. I’m extremely risk averse in real life so naturally this also affects my chess. I’ve always disliked playing against people who play ‘dubious’ openings and throw all that “correct” play out the window, maybe because I consider it disrespectful or some such – it’s very unpleasant for me to lose to an opponent who played some objectively bad (but subjectively good/maybe even brilliant) moves, whereas it feels much better if he just outplayed me by playing like a computer – but I know as well as you that “moves that are proven unsound after weeks of analysis win games”. Which is part of why I’ve started to try to move my comfort zone so that I’m better able to handle that stuff.

“There is no right and wrong side here.” Agreed, it’s mostly a matter of style. However I should add something which I’ve become more aware of after having played quite a few standard time control games; if you play moves which are not completely sound, you need to know exactly what you’re doing if you play a game with something approaching 2 hours on the clock – if not, you’ll lose a lot of games because your opponent will find something quite close to the best defence. Stated another way, if you go for a setup with an unclear position, either make sure the other player has never seen it before or be ready to play all the best moves. Strong players are really, really good and they’ve seen it all before so if the unclear position you’re heading for is somewhat objectively bad for you if the opponent plays all the right moves, it’s very risky; he just might do that.

Another player with a mindset similar to Tartakower is Bent Larsen who died not long ago. His 1.b3 opening was kind of his way of saying: ‘I don’t expect to get a big advantage from the opening, but I do expect to get a complex middle game with a lot of play. Let the best man win.’ And he very often did – in a recent article in Skakbladet (‘The Chess Magazine’ – which is published by the Danish Chess Federation) Peter Heine Nielsen notes that in his database he has 47 games with Larsen playing b3; Larsen had an impressive score of 81%.

Comment by US | May 1, 2011 | Reply