It works

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Yesterday I won my first game solely due to the new acquired skills to see knightforks and pins fast and easy. I played against an opponent who is tactically quite strong. It worked exactly as Dan Heisman said it would work: There was a series of captures with a knightfork involved. At the end I had the possibility to pin a knight and win a piece due to the pin. Nothing complicated, everything pretty straightforward. But I had seen the pin at the end of the series of captures which my opponent had not.

I expected my method to work, but my expectations proved mostly to be wrong the past 10 years. So it is a relief that this one is confirmed. Finally.

As Heisman put it:

"I had a USCF 1900 rating after two years of play and was easily defeating 1600- 1700 players who were much older than I and had been playing (and reading chess material) for 10-20+ years. In the post-mortems we would review lines and my opponent would say, “I thought you would do that, but I didn’t see that at the end you had another check…” And that’s how they often lost!"