Warm-up Excercises

I probably should have played a few more standard time control training games this weekend, but that's how it often goes living in the Antipodes... just as I'm logging in, my European and North American team mates are logging off.

So I settled for a couple of 5' + 12" rated blitz games, before which I spent half an hour or so reviewing about 80 positions from "1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations". Prior to each Teamleague game I intend to use at least an hour doing this.

It worked quite well, but I will have to seriously consider my use of the French Defense in 'serious' games. I love playing the French. It is the ultimate game of counter-attack. The idea is that you practically give White the whole board and let him think he has the space advantage, the initiative, the attack, until he realises he can do nothing with it. And then you strike back. Either the central 'mess' of pawns becomes a 'mass', or the Queen breaks free with the support of a minor piece with unmeetable threats, or that beautiful 'bad' Queen's Bishop, so long trapped behind it's own pawns suddenly dominates the board (after, say, a timely d4 push).

It's walking the edge of the precipice - that's the fun of it. In my first game today my opponent employed the Nimzovichian strategy of sacrificing a pawn for the blockade, making my central mess block my own pieces. In the early middlegame I found an "anti-combination" that cost a piece for a couple of pawns, then in the late middlegame I saw one move further and won my piece back with a simple barrage / pin (thanks, Fred!). So I had a couple of extra pawns in the Rook endgame and nearly managed to botch it allowing a too-close-for-comfort pawn race. My saving grace was another neat little pin / decoy tactic (thanks again, Fred!) allowing me to promote first and settle the issue.

Normally against the Petroff I play 3. d4 which sometimes gets back into the mainline a couple of tempi ahead although in theory doesn't promise White anything more than anything else. So on the spur of the moment I decided to try an Italian 4-Knights (with Bc4) which is equally unenterprising but perhaps less likely the sort of game my opponent expected to be playing. After the usual sort of arguments around Black playing Nd4 and trying for the Bg4 pin (my Queen was already on d2), I was able to attack an immobilised piece and play a couple of simple pins and forks in successive moves which netted material and convinced my opponent to resign after 18 moves.

I could hardly say I showered myself in glory, but the technique of reviewing a few dozen tactics before playing paid dividends, it put me in the right fighting frame of mind to recover a bad position and press on in an otherwise equal one.