The art of attack

The current job 

My work for the next year is cut out for me. First I must master the basic tactics, then I must master the advanced tactics. I have let grandmasters do the job of gathering the exact right positions for me. The work is simply to train every day, first building the basics, and then slowly extend on the basics, while repeating the basics from time to time.

Openings

In the build up to the tournaments I played this summer, I consciously accepted a few holes. I have three new openings in my repertoire, and I totally abandoned all opening preparations. Of course this will lead, and has already led to some weird early losses. For the coming year, I simply accept that, for a few reasons. The first is that I can only spend my time once, and I must plug the biggest holes first. The second is that I have a philosophy about openings, that when I decide to plug the holes related to the openings, I will do so with a minimum amount of effort. I expect tactics to become my forte, if I look how things are going right now, so if I can get my opponents out of book as soon as possible without too many damage, I deprive them from their openings advantage. There are 25 billion possibilities in the first four moves, and I must be able to find a few moves that are both playable and not well known, with the aid of GM Stockfish. The third reason, is that the middlegame is the biggest hole I have to plug. I have some ideas about sitting ducks, the battle of the LoA's and Nimzowitsch, larded with the ideas of GM Smirnov, but I have no complete picture of how I want to conduct a middlegame. When I don't have a clear picture of the middlegame, I cannot choose the right openings that are in accordance with the type of middlegames I want to play. So any opening preparation at this stage might be a waste of time anyway.

Endgames

I have done some serious endgame preparation already. I consciously postpone to harvest the fruits from this study. For the simple reason that mastering the endgames will only bring me another 100 rating points at the most. But no worries, when everything else is done, I will return to the endgames again and reap my rightful fruits. In the mean time, I trust that the spaced repetition of Chessable will prevent the loss of anything I already learned.

The sitting ducks

The slowly moving pieces like the king and the pawns, are the easiest to transform into a target. First you must fixate them so they can't escape, then you must put them under pressure. I call the king and the pawns the sitting ducks of the game. Only the king is a target that is present from the beginning of the game. A weak pawn must be created first.

A target is only a target when there is an attacker. This means, there must be a line of attack between the attacker and the target. Without a line of attack there can't be no attack.

The killbox

I analyzed all 32 mates. I found the following: the nine squares where the opposing king is, are important. I call those squares the killbox. In the art of attack it is called the mating net. I don't bother about terminology. Later is soon enough to make the terms consistent. For now, I use my own terminology, so I will not be restricted by formal considerations.

Every mate comes about with attackers that point into the killbox. If there is no line of attack from an attacker that ends in the killbox, there can't be a mating attack.

My System

I never bothered about time when conducting chess study. But due to my illness lately, I realized that time is not infinite. Albeit my disease is under control, I want to flick in some measures to increase the chance that I will see some results in this life. My System contains a wealth of information. But it took me to read the book two times before I realized that. That there is really a system in My System. That is simply not efficient enough. In this stage of my life, I must let grandmasters do the hard work. In order to make something of My System, I must do the work myself. There is simply no time for decoding the book. So for now, I abandon the book. With pain in my heart.

The art of attack

There is a book though where a grandmaster has already done the job. The art of attack by Vukovic. Although it is a hard read too, there are some pre's. I already studied it in the past globally. Now there is a digital version by Chessable, with contributions of GM Williams, GM Nunn en FM Plichta. Besides that, it is computer checked.

So I ordered a digital copy and started to read. I already smell the sitting duck, the lines of attack and the pivotal points. I'll keep you posted.