Temposchlucker

. . . In this post I will take a few huge steps that may be hard to follow. Or swallow. But I feel the intrinsic logic behind it allthough I don't spend much time to write it down clearly. Don't let that keep you from commenting though. I hope you can bear with me. I will try to clarify matters later. In a previous post I defined the following triptych for what to do when there is nothing to do, I found: a bipolar goal to strive for. Decline the possibilities of your opponent while improving your own. A hierarchy of moves based on the amount they attribute to the optimal position and the amount of tempo's needed. A hierarchy in piece move vs pawnmoves. I looked close into this and realized that you are actually trying to trap your opponent by denying him possibilities. Mate is just the ultimate trap. Unfavarouble moves arise as the only options when trapped. I wrote about traps as one of two tactical methods here . Now I found out that the trap is the basic of chess. Ev...

. . . Finally I found the time and energy to write my own chess analysis program. That is to say, I wrote the first step. I wanted to do that for about seven years. The problem with chess programs as Fritz etc. is that they don't give you a good insight in how they arrive at a certain move. When I tried to get insight lately in what aspect of piece activity causes the most problems for the opponent I missed that dearly. The idea is as follows. The program reads a PGN file and shows it. For every aspect I want to investigate I write a specific algorithm that will show the development of that aspect during the game. For instance, I want to know how much every piece is standing in the way of other pieces. Or how many squares manoeuvring room each side has. The questions will change overtime when insight grows. The sky is the limit. The parser for PGN games is now completed and it works like a charm. To be continued.

. . . Initiative and symmetry. There are some remnants to be dealt with first: initiative and symmetric positions. I will do that by disqualifying the initiative. The scope of my investigation is what to do when there is nothing to do . When there are no weaknesses to provoke and the preconditions of a kingside attack aren't met. The initiative works by means of threats which have to be dealt with. An extreme example is a quite symmetrical position. None of the sides can claim a positional advantage, since everything is equal. Yet the game can be lost due the other side having the initiative. So the initiative is clearly beyond the scope of this research. For now. When to move a pawn. Pawns are a means to reduce the space of your opponent and to improve the manoeuvring room for your own pieces. Whenever you can do it unpunished , you have to move your pawns. In practice unpunished without preparation means in the opening . Further in the game you have to improve your position firs...

. . . Count down to the hypothetical ideal position. While thinking about tempo's in chess I realized that we tend to count them in the wrong direction. When the chess pieces are in the begin position, I can imagine an ideal position where all the pieces are on their best squares. There is a minimum amount of tempo's required to reach that ideal position. You can only do it slower, by spilling moves, but not faster. As long as your pieces haven't reached their optimal positions, tempo's do play a role. If your opponent spills some tempo's, you can afford to do the same, without being punished. Once the ideal position is reached, the word tempo starts to loose its meaning. So you count down the tempo's until have reached the hypothetical ideal situation. From the start of the game, to become well developed is the ideal situation. In the opening you can lose tempo's. Once well developed, you can't. That is what Nimzowitsch meant by "there is a differe...

. . . When all my pieces are active as can be but there are no weaknesses to aim at I often ask my self "now what?". What should be the goal of all my manoeuvres, moving of worst pieces, pawnmoves and piece activity? In order to find out I have been counting covered squares, attacked pieces, manoeuvring squares, amount of pieces on the covered diagonal etc.. I read articles about piece activity and mobility. I compared the outcomes of my countings in problempositions with the final solution. Slowly it dawned upon me that everything boils down to two principles which are two sides of the same coin. There are two aims to strive for: Disrupt the hostile communication lines of the enemy pieces and deprive them from possibilities. Do the opposite for your own pieces. Ask yourself which piece or pawn is standing in my way? If no targets have cristallized yet, the battle is about possibilities. He who has the most possibilities has the biggest chances to come up with something tha...

. . . When the preconditions of a kingside attack aren't met and a weakness cannot be provoked, the game is in such a stage that it is not evident what to do. I have a whole bunch of loose idea's that can be applied at this stage. But there is no cohesy nor hierarchy in this bunch of idea's. At a certain point I bundled a lot of these idea's together under the same noumer piece activity . This is no longer sufficient. This is a first attempt to bring somewhat more order. First of all I have to give this stage a distinct name for convenience. Let me call it the stage of improving the position. Summing up the ingredients. Before order can be applied we must know which ingredients play a role. Sofar I have identified the following topics: Prophylaxis. Piece activity. Flexibility. Manoeuvring your pieces. Preparing for potential targets. Attacking two weaknesses. Outnumbering. Pawns. Manoeuvring space. Dual purpose move. Improving your worst piece. The tempo of the game. Pr...

. . . There are two obvious targets in chess: the opposite king and a weak pawn. I can attack the king if the preconditions of Vukovic are met and I can attack a weak pawn if I have induced one (see previous post ). If the preconditions are not met or if I can't induce a weak pawn I have to: Improve my position. I can move pieces or pawns in order to reorganize my pieces. But how do I improve my position? Logically I suspect that my organizing manoeuvres must be related to the two targets mentioned above. But how? One of the preconditions of a kingside attack is that I have to outnumber the defensive pieces by 3 (2 in the case of a pawnstorm). But I cannot force that! Yet the moves I do must have at least some relation to the main targets. Otherwise I'm just moving back and forth. Outnumbering. Now I mention it, outnumbering seems to be an essential element of every attack. The problem is, that if I do pile up my pieces against a target, my opponent can do the same by pili...

. . . After a half year break of chess study I restarted this weekend. There are two main problems: first of all I have now two other hobbies which consume time, singing and geology. Secondly I have the feeling that I have found a way to improve and have a tendency to see that as the end of the road. So I must force myself to actually prove my case. A good help is that the chess season is now in full swing here and I feel that I have become rusty. Ok, what am I up to? Previously it was my intention to keep radio silence untill I reached 2000. I have re-evaluated this and asked myself if blogging is going to be helpful. During the break I have forgotten every knowledge about chess that I didn't "own". It was very helpful to reread my old posts while mapping out the future. So I have come to the conclusion that some dosed blogging will be helpful. Which is what I'm going to do. Let me recapitulate my starting point. I have found that the pattern recognition in itself is...

. . . Internet promotes definitively the contact between people. It was fun to meet two of my fellow bloggers in real lately, Polly and CMOB . Polly conformed remarkably well to the stereotype I had in mind of American women who in my prejudice always carry around a camera and taking pictures all the time while speaking with a slow nasal accent. CMOB is a silent guy who has some nervous energy hanging around him. As I already expected on basis of our blogs, we all three had clearly very little in common besides chess. Nevertheless it was quite enjoyable and we had enough to talk about. We met at hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam where a tournament was going on. We looked at the games and we talked about chess. After some time we decided to go to "chesscafe" Batavia and play a few games. I played a Polar Bear against Polly. What can I say about her playing style? She blundered alot during her games. I wondered why. I guess it is a habit of her to don't evaluate the moves of...