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Not much to say about round 3 unfortunately, except that it gives me an opportunity to use the word "Zwickmuhle", and there being nothing else to report I wont pass up on the opportunity.
Zwickmuhle (there's an umlaut over the 'u') literally means "double mill", or in Chess a "windmill" attack, although in German it has conotations of a conundrum or "catch-22" situation. Usually it involves a repeated discovered check motif where the uncovering piece chops its way through all the material within it's reach. In this position the Black Knight finds 3 White men on the points of it's f3 wheel. Sadly, our guy was on the wrong side of this Zwickmuhle, but they are always pretty to look at, so...
Our Guy vs Their GuyBlack to move "Zwickmuhle"
White has just played 1. Rg1 to prevent immediate mate and play continued 1. ... Nxh4+ 2. Kh2 Nf3+ 3. Kg2 Nxd4+ 4. Kh2 Nf3+ 5. Kg2 Nxg1+ etc. White could also have lost with 4. Kf1 so the Zwickmuhle is not strictly 'forced', but if you're going down anyway, you might as well illustrate the theme.
Hypermagnus' plan to play unusual openings was trumped this round when his 2200+ opponent opened 1. h3 again proving the point that any starting move is good at amateur level.
I sat out this round but will be on board 3 in round 4 with Mejdanblues coming in on board 4 as our substitute for chestutr.
Oh, you wanted the team score for this week? In round figures, we scored a round figure...
It started just over six months ago as "100 Days To Chess Improvement" and since I didn't want my 100th post to be about Teamleague 38 round 3 (for reasons that will become apparent when I write it) I thought I'd take this opportunity to review my journey into the blogosphere and think about where it's going.
I've picked up a few regular visitors to my "Public Chess Diary", and I'd especially like to thank those of you who've taken the trouble to leave the comments that have started appearing lately. Feedback is always welcome from any visitor, please consider signing off with your FICS handle, or your own blog or (non-commercial) website address - talking with Mr Anonymous is still nice, but well, you know...
I suppose the big question is "did it work?", "it" being the systematised tactics training excercise I undertook at the beginning of this blog.
When I first came to FICS about 6 years ago I was able to maintain a 1900ish rating, this came off the back of being bored on the train and casually working through the first half of "The Encyclopaedia of Chess Middlegames". My blitz (5 12) rating peaked about 18 months later at 1618 which I largely put down to a side effect of manually relaying GM games. Something must have gone in, I guess. The following couple of years of playing haphazardly and doing no study at all saw these drop to the mid-1700's and 1300's respectively.
I can say I've completed Reinfeld's "1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations" in that I've worked through them all, many of them numerous times, but I haven't quite continued on as intended and reached the point where I can go through the entire book in an hour or so visualising the key lines of the solutions. Much of my tactical vision is back, combos do leap out of the board at me again now.
It's a qualified success. My blitz rating was recently (briefly) active at 1613 and my standard is finally the right side of 1800 again. It's not a 'J' curve yet, but we've just about got a 'U' and proceeding in the right direction.
I did make a start on the next phase of improvement, "How To Analyse", which has stalled somewhat. Analysis is the chore of playing Chess. It has however improved naturally even from the bit of tactics work I've done. Having good recognition of tactical patterns seems to act as memory pegs which hold the position in place down the tree of the key variations at least. It still needs a lot of work and I will return to it eventually, but there's something else I want to do first, which may also aid analysis in the way tactics have.
I want a proper opening repertoire. This is a surprisingly big step for me, because I always heeded the advice that opening theory is useless to amateur players. I've come to the conclusion that what this really means is that the rote memorisation of opening lines is pointless at this level, which I still think holds true. Many players it seems have a couple of pet lines and model games and spend their life trying to re-enact them. They get 'out of book' and then the blunders - tactical and positional - abound.
What I intend to do is look at systems. What type of middle and endgame position arises from certain types of openings, and what positional ideas and tactical motifs are common to them? Until now, my notion of playing the opening has been to get the pieces out then hope I can make something of it. I have absolutely no idea what happens in Queen's pawn games, and only that King's pawn games "tend to be more tactical". I can push the King-pawn, but I've never really studied any specific opening. I've simply survived as long as I have by dint of trial and error experience.
There'll be no opening lines, no fixed order of moves. Just ideas of the nature "if I've played this move, I'm working towards this freeing move. I'm creating this kind of pawn structure which will be good in a Bishop ending but bad with Rooks". I want to know what all this Slav / semi-Slav / Meran / anti-Meran business is about. I want to be able to start a game, and after the other fellow pushes his first pawn be thinking "my first plan is to achieve..." not "ok, so I know a couple of the next moves, let's see where he takes the game".
I want a proper opening repertoire. After any first couple of moves I want to be able to know where the game is heading, and take a part in steering the course. The next phase of improvement is to be able to say "I know what the basic specific ideas and plans in this opening are. I know what sort of moves and manoevers I need to make to achieve my objectives and undermine his. I know what sort of middlegame might arise, and I know how to prepare for the likely endgames.".
Let's take a look at the game gambiitti came within a whisker of holding last week. After a superb opening (see Black's 7th, 8th, and 9th moves!) gambiitti made a time-trouble error which left him with a Rook vs 2 Knights + pawn material deficit.
I'm impressed with the way gambiitti handled the defense and kept fighting, but I want to offer a couple of ideas based not on good moves, but on effective use of the psychological factors present in this game.
Move 25 is the point at which White needs to make the new plan. The Bishops are on opposite colours. If we can trade all other pieces the one pawn minus should be drawable. If the pawns come off, 2 lone Knights can't force checkmate. The White King is already better placed to take a fighting part in the game. Clear up the situation on the Queenside first, those pawns look easier to exchange off. The ultimate solution if we can get some pawns off and exchange a Rook is to sacrifice the other Rook for any remaining pawns. Especially given Black's subsequent play, I think it is perfectly legitimate here to ask "do you know the technique for mating with KBN vs K?". It's easy if you know how, but not something you'll be able to discover at the board if you haven't practiced it. Not an awful lot to go on, but now let's consider the psychological factors.
Up to this point, Black had been moving very quickly - using just a few seconds on each move. This tells us he is playing reactively and is more likely to play against White's plans than to construct an active plan of his own. Furthermore, see what happened when he did finally start to use time at move 25. In the next 10 moves or so, Black achieves next to nothing while the active White Rooks penetrate his position. This tells us that he hasn't been able to make a plan for how to win this position.
By move 35 he's happy for the Rook to sit passively on a8, the Bishop is being pushed around by the Rooks, the defense of both the Knight and f7 is becoming awkward, and White is coming dangerously close to forcing a repetition by alternately attacking these weaknesses.
gambiitti(1829) vs gile(1735)After 37. ... Nd6
gambiitti(1829) vs gile(1735)After 43. ... g5
This position has a number of important features. The Rook is ideally placed at a6 where it cuts off the King. It will take a few moves to pass the 3rd rank - frustration! White has won a pawn and now has a majority on the Queenside. Should the Bishop ever leave the a3-f8 diagonal, a4! creates a passed pawn which will draw Black pieces away from the Kingside and allow the White King entry to harrass the pawns there. As happens in this game, they always seem to automatically capture en passant after a move like a4, which is bad for the attacker. Black needs to keep pawns on the board, and that b4 pawn can ultimately become a distant passer when the White pawns are won - b3 is a target that can distract White from his active defense.
44. f5 is a tempting, threatening looking move that the desperate defender should always avoid! As the pawns become more separated, the chore of maintaining them becomes ever more difficult. It is not a question of 'if' but 'when' this over-extended pawn will be lost. 44. fxg5 is the move in accordance with our principles - pawns must be exchanged! - and after 44. ... hxg5 45. Kg4 with the idea of playing h4, White is getting very close to several of the unwinnable ending scenarios.
Some More Rules For Desperate Defense.
7. Force the attacker to make plans and decisions - they often find the wrong one.
8. Moving to and fro without the attacker being able to make progress is frustrating for him and can lead to repetition by alternately attacking two weaknesses, or lead to a rash and bad move on his part.
9. Keep your own pawns close together so they can mutually protect or be protected by a single piece. Advance them only if exchange is certain (or at least quite likely), or else leave them where they are and say "come get me" - put the onus on the attacker to work out a way to win them!
10. Keep fighting! The most important point! Make threats, cheap tactical threats if needs be, positional threats with passed pawns, and threats to exchange down to unwinnable or difficult to win positions.
Sometimes you find yourself in a hopeless position and your opponent makes good moves and obviously has a plan of campaign. Those games you just resign and move on to the next one.
I may never be a Grandmaster, but one area of Chess my patzering about has made me expert in is defending hopeless positions, such as I had in Teamleague round 1 and gambiitti had last week. Let's delve into the bag of dirty tricks and look at what can be done to salvage a botched game - I randomly guesstimate that 2 out of 5 bad positions can be saved using these techniques at amateur level.
The first and most important thing to understand is that as soon as you realise the game has turned against you, you must make a solid plan and be aware of all the drawing potentials the position holds.
Making a plan is probably the only similarity between playing these positions and the way you would normally play.
SimianChatter(1785) vs Evilthunder(1931)
After 17. ... Re8 Time to make a plan!
Suddenly it dawns on White that the trapper has been trapped. Initially we can get 3 pawns for the piece as the Black d-pawn must fall too - formal material equality - but our h-pawn is weak and playing g3 to defend it provides Black with new targets on our third rank. It will be better to lose that pawn on h5 doubling Black's h-pawns, extracting some enemy blood for it's life. Any small concession we can get from the opponent is a step closer to our goal.
We will have pawn majorities on both wings and one or two protected passed pawns. These features will be our major trumps. The major pieces must come off, since the Black Rooks can do more damage than their White counterparts - if they succeed in penetrating to the first or second rank we are dead. This goes contrary to the general principal of not exchanging when you're down in material, but we need to force Black into a position where he can only win by promoting a pawn and then finding an endgame in which no promotion can be forced.
Next we must make full use of the psychology which affects players who have a won game but have to grind it out in a long ending. To win a mutually well played game of Chess it is said you must cross the precipice of defeat. To save a hopless position you must do this several times.
SimianChatter(1785) vs Evilthunder(1931)After 43. Ne5 The Precipice!
43. Ne5 offers Black the opportunity to win in two different ways, either by exchanging off the Knight, or by going for the g-pawn with 43. ... Kg3. Both methods require careful calculation on Black's part. The former allows White scarey looking connected passed pawns, and the later commits the King deep into territory which for a few moves will leave it away from the main play - there may be a nasty race where White wins a Bishop on d7 and maybe even gets the Knight back in time to stop the g-pawn after which the Queenside pawns might get exchanged off and the Black King is too distant to help.
In such situations, as occured here, the stronger side will usually prefer to avoid any risk and wait for a cleaner opportunity to win. By playing a 'safe' move however, Black affords White the opportunity to eliminate the g-pawn. That this is achieved at the cost of two White pawns is immaterial. The fight is now transferred to the Queenside where White still holds a pawn majority, has an active King and Knight against the Bishops (i.e. the forces on that side of the board are about equal), and the Black King will need a few moves to return to the fray.
In Chess, it is normal that the defender is required to calculate more accurately than the attacker. In these situations things are reversed; accurate analysis will only reveal to you more ways to lose and become disheartening. It requires a certain amount of bluff and bravado to defend bad positions, and put the onus on the attacker to accurately calculate a winning line. As often as not, they will go for a safe move and wait for an easier chance. This spells opportunity for the defender.
A broader effect of White's resilience is that the longer he can put up resistance, the more frustrated Black will become at not being able to finish off the game. And frustration will cause oversights and errors. In the previous post on this game I gave a diagram where Black missed a simple mating tactic that would have won the game (another precipice!). There are several times where White shuffles back and forth a bit without Black making progress - this is frustrating! If the stronger side is not making progess the weaker side is. If your opponent is becoming frustrated by having the better position in a game of Chess, he deserves no sympathy whatever!
Some Rules For Desperate Defense.
1. Make a new plan as soon as you realise the position has gone bad.
2. Pawns must be exchanged. This can be done at a loss if you have more pawns.
3. Decide which pieces need to be exchanged and which to be retained. Minor piece endings are harder to win than major piece endings are.
4. Resilience will cause your opponent to become frustrated and make oversights and errors. Be ready to pounce.
5. Keep whatever pieces (including the King!) you have left as active as possible. A passive piece defending a pawn is probably better exchanged off for an active attacking piece.
6. Use bluff and bravado - put the onus on the attacker to accurately calculate winning lines. Advanced passed pawns and out-of-play pieces give a fearful impression. The more resistance you have given, the more effective you will be persuading your opponent to wait for a simpler opportunity.
In the end it was a narrow 1.5-2.5 loss for team Current_Affairs against TeamTsubasa in round 2 after a drama filled final game.
HyperMagnus was true to his word in playing unusual openings, in this round after his opponent was more than an hour late he assayed the "unplayed agreed draw" variation, sportingly eschewing the solid and forcing "win by forfeit" line.
Gambiitti had a cracking start to his first real Teamleague game, including forcing his opponent to play 7. ... Qd8, 8. ... Nb8, and 9. ... Bc8 leaving all the Black pieces in their starting positions! I coined the term uberantisteinitzian to describe such a position of moving pieces to the back rank when it's not part of a good plan. Gambiitti's own 9th move offered an elegant pseudo Queen sacrifice to complete the manoeuver.
Things get difficult in Chess when you have a bind on the position but time-trouble conspires to prevent you finding the variation that consolidates your advantage. I don't normally detail too much about our team's defeats, but this game has a special interest for me - White's position became objectively lost but in the next few moves Black set about demonstrating he had no idea how to win the position and in the next 30 moves White made considerably more progress from the weaker position than did his opponent.
Bitter experience has given me plenty of practice playing such games, where correct analysis will only reveal more ways you could lose, but there are ample practical opportunities to exploit. As a twin with my game against Evilthunder from round 1 I might do a future post on this game, looking at the art of positional swindles, encouraging your opponent to make bad decisions, and the psychology of saving games against players who are reticent to make commital moves from a superior position.
One truth of amateur Chess is that more points and half-points are scored by continuing to fight than by playing in perfect accordance with the position, and by virtue of that gambiiti got dangerously close. "Schach ist Kampf!".
My round 2 game in Teamleague 38 was a danger game for several reasons. I had the Black pieces against a lower rated opponent (the first time I've had a lower rated opponent in any Teamleague game), and looking at his history through the WatchBot site he's improving rapidly - by about 100 points in the last couple of months. Further, he has an excellent record playing Queen's Pawn openings with the White pieces.
I'd first wanted to play the freeing ... Ne4 manoeuver at move 8 but decided Bf4 was a good response and wanted to get my King tucked away first. At move 11 I had another long look at it (more than 12 minutes) only to find I still can't analyse very well, and wondering about Bxe7, Bxe4, with Ne5. As is evidenced by the lack of posts on the subject, I haven't done much work on "thinking like a Grandmaster" lately! In the end I was wasting too much time looking (or should I say "staring blankly") at it and ended up with the attitude "play it and be damned!". If it was wrong my opponent would have to spot a trick I hadn't seen, and there's always the hope that given the time I'd spent he'd trust me that I had it all worked out. Chess at this level has far too much in common with poker.
As it happens, Rybka is happy to play ... Ne4 at moves 9, 10, or 11, but starts looking at other things with deeper analysis.
I was happy to see 14. e4, as I thought that both the exchanges and pressure on the isolated Queen's Pawn could only improve my game. It only remained to get my Bishop and Rook into the game to be certain I was fully equal at the least, and after some to-ing and fro-ing with the Queen I succeeded in this.
20. ... Qf6 was my first tangible threat of the game and although my opponent permitted Bxh3 at the next move I decided against it because after gxh3 Qxf3, Re7 I've given up my defense of f7 and the Rook is established on my second rank to start chewing through my pawns. Instead I chose ... Rd8 with the idea of ... Rxd4 with mating threats if the Rook came to e7, or to work on the d4 pawn if he defended the Bxh3 threat. Rybka coldly snaps off the h3 pawn on move 21 with the Rook still at a8 and advantage to Black, but I'm happy with my decision to develop and build the pressure, and more so for the promising sign of having looked further than the obvious combination to see if there was a sting in the tail.
At around moves 23-30, I found myself in a unique situation for me in Teamleague. I'm a solid pawn up in a good position and I only have to find a suitable plan to bring home the full point - those over-extended White Queen side pawns look the likely target. On the downside, I'm playing on my 45 second increments after all that wasted time in the opening. The general purpose ... h6 and repeating positions were obviously not optimal moves, but gained time on the clock while I steeled myself to play 30. ... Re8.
Playing moves like 30. ... Re8 cause me deep psychological trauma. Moving a piece from an apparently well protected square where it's putting pressure on a significant weakness in the opposing camp into a self-pin on an unprotected square seems contrary to all general principles of good play. But that is the point. General principles are subordinate to specific considerations. With the Rook on d8 I can't take the Queen side pawns with the Queen because White has the removal of defender combination Rxe6! winning a piece.
3 pawns up my opponent spared me playing out the Queen ending with the pseudo-resignation of allowing mate-in-1, but with 2 or 3 outside passed pawns and a protected King, even I should be able to find a win there.
With the match score standing at 1-1, both our new lads (HyperMagnus and gambiitii) have White in their games. HyperMagnus is "threatening" to play bizarre and obscure openings in his games. I for one am all for it, I still don't believe knowning opening theory is an advantage below master level, and I don't think players at this level can really refute 'unsound' openings - certainly not ones they're not familiar with, and not over the board.
Thanks to a 'perfect' game first time up from gambiitti who won without moving a piece, and draws from HyperMagnus and me, team Current_Affairs (lowest rated in our section) secured a 2-2 draw with the highest rated team MonkeyClub2000 in round 1.
It's good to see HyperMagnus playing competitively again - the more so because he's on our team! - his use of the Birmingham Defense was inspired, and I don't just say so because that's where I grew up! The 1. e4 a6, 2. d4 b5 defense was so named because GM Tony Miles used it to beat GM Karpov at a tournament in Birmingham, England. Hyper's opponent tried a plan of quickly fianchettoing his King's Bishop which allowed ... f5! immediately hacking at the centre.
My own desperate rear-guard action has most gratifyingly produced several spoils of battle; not only half a game point (boosting my overall Teamleague tally by 50%), and some ratings points (almost 1800 again...), but also and most valuable, the virtue of hanging in there and hoping against hope has netted the team a precious half a match point to kick off the season, in a round in which only one team had a decisive result, and that by the narrowest margin of 2.5-1.5.
Everything to play for! Roll on Round 2!
Teamleague 38 Round 1 is well under way, and it befell me to get things started for team Current_Affairs. I despise the use of the word 'luck' in connection with a Chess game, but if it is possible, it must be said I had my fair share in this one.
It's the St. George / Yugoslav (depending where you come from) attack against the Sicilian Dragon, and I settled in for my first long think after 14. ... Qa5. It's a sad truth, not to mention the challenge of playing Chess, that when players start making their own decisions, they invariably make bad choices. 15. Nd5 uncovering an attack on the unprotected Black Queen and threatening the Zwischenzug Nxe7+ is a standard tactic in many variations of the Sicilian, but as is apparent here, it doesn't work in the Dragon!
Naturally I should have suspected a counter-trap, but I spent most of the time convincing myself White is good after 15. ... Nxd5 16. Qxa5 Nxe3 17. c3 Nxd1 18 Rxd1. Rybka gives 17. Qxa7 as an improvement on that line, but either way White is fine.
[Aside: I've installed a couple more engines lately, Rybka 2.2n2, Fruit 2.3.1, and for old times sake Colossus Chess 2008b in nostalgia for Colossus Chess 2.0 on the Commodore 64. They're all older (freeware) versions, but rated around 2800 so good enough for my purposes!]
After 17. ... Re8 the White Knight is trapped - something I should have been alert to after the game with mrundersun - it can't use d5 because the Bishop on e3 is unprotected. It's time to take stock and decide what I can do to make a fight of it instead of resigning right out of the opening again.
Objectively White is lost, but I can get about 3 pawns for the piece and one of them is already passed. I say 'about' because it's difficult to count them accurately. I'm winning the d-pawn as in the game, but my h-pawn is problematic. The real idea of pushing it to h5 was to weaken and double Black's h-pawns in hope of capturing them later, my back rank looks too weak to recapture with the Rook immediately. Fortunately my opponent allowed me to simply exchange it off.
This is the strategy with which I have salvaged many a hopeless "pawns for a piece" blitz game; try to keep exchanging pawns until the opponent finds himself in an unwinnable ending. Black's a-pawn can become a non-entity if he should find himself left with only it and his White-squared Bishop, the famous 'impotent pair' that can't force promotion. One implication of this is that White can use an uneven exchange rate: so long as the g-pawn comes off it can be paid for with the White f- and g-pawns, then the four Queen-side pawns can be squandered provided they buy the life of the Black b-pawn.
So there's the plan I will stick to for the remainder of the game. Oddly enough, in a practical sense at least, Rook exchanges actually get the defender closer to the objective. Black succeeds in gaining only one more pawn exchanging the Rooks off when although the two Bishops dominate the board, they cannot by their nature be used to barrage the White pawns, and with the remaining King and Knight staying active, fighting defensive possibilities abound. Had a Rook arrived on my second rank, doubtless the c-pawn would have fallen and I would have resigned... but he kept giving me a glimmer of hope.
42. f4, Ne5, g4, f5 is a typical idea in this sort of game, putting the onus on Black to accurately calculate whether he can stop connected passed pawns after taking the Knight or clean up with the commital ... Kg3. The result this time was mutual annihilation of the King side pawns and so now I only have to eliminate b6.
One last position in the game is worth a closer look.
SimianChatter (1785) vs Evilthunder (1931)Position after 57. a4
The a-pawn has been held back until now because the King needs the entry square a4, but it is just here when White appears to be forcing through the last phase of the defensive plan that the position is most hopeless! After 57. ... a5+! the White King must of course advance but it was (fortunately!) not until after the game that I realised the intended 58. Kb5 Kc7 59. c5 fails to exchange the b-pawn due to the small detail of 59. ... Bd3#. 59. Ka6 is of course hopeless, and 40 fighting moves come to nought!
57. ... Bxd5 doubtless expected the 'automatic' reply 58. cxd5 and a won pawn ending (mate in 24 apparently), but 58. a5 secures the exchange of the b-pawn and the draw with it.
It's not a win, but it is at least a result. The error was to deviate from my plan of "prising open the h-file then sac, sac, mate" as Fischer describes this attack, and trying to out-tactic an opponent who obviously knew the theory better than me. It was after that however, a triumph of formulating a defensive plan and seeing it through to the end.
Our Guy vs Their Guy
