Technique

Some brainstorming to get the juices flowing. 

There seems to be some kind of trinity:

• What must you do
• How can you do it
• Frequency of occurrence

Tactics are about gaining wood. There are three types:

• Material gain
• Promotion
• Mate

There is a whole lot of what going on in the game. A few examples:

• Favourable exchanges
• Favourable pawn structure
• Claiming space
• Create a passer
• Dominance of an open file
• Fight for an outpost
• Et cetera

It seems to be that every what has its own set of techniques. A sort of specified tactics which are not geared around gaining wood but around fulfilling a specific what.

We must focus on a high frequency of occurrence. Techniques around the poisoned pawn variation in the Najdorf may win you a game, but how often can you get it on the board? Or even worse, someone finds a novelty some day and a whole variation is suddenly busted. We must be careful about where we spend our time on.

Exchanges have a high frequency of occurrence. They occur in every game, guaranteed. There are specific techniques involved to force an exchange. Like making use of a lack of space, a pin, or a function that cannot be abandoned.

Every what has its why behind it. So maybe we are not talking about a trinity but about a quaternity.

Saddling your opponent with an IQP might result in a set of things you need to do:

• block the pawn
• trade pieces
• win the endgame

Maybe you must fend off an attack first. Often an attack can peter out when you trade the attackers.

You try to trade pieces, but not at all costs. You don't trade pieces which helps your opponent to fix his pawn structure.

So every what has its detailed knowledge. And every detail has its own frequency of occurrence. And we must estimate beforehand whether we should invest time in it to study it or not.

We must find the higher level of abstraction behind this all. There can be hundreds of reasons that make an exchange favourable. But it doesn't make sense to learn them all by heart. We must find the concepts behind the reasons.

If I look at the list above, it seems that pawns are the common factor. Pawns determine:

• what lines can be lines of attack
• which squares (points of pressure) are important
• where can protected passers be formed
• when to liquidate to an ending
• which pieces are bad
• how many space you have
• et cetera

Plans are related to the slow moving pieces on the board. The king, the pawns and the pieces that are slowed down by functions they can't abandon. Maybe you remember the sitting ducks we talked about. But it is broader than just being a target that can't move fast enough out of harm's way. Pawns determine the total landscape. And by being slow and unidirectional, you can base your plans on it.

Evidently I tapped into a whole new realm of chess thinking. I never saw the coherency so clearly before. I'm going to think about that. I hope I don't end up with a set of trivialities again.

At least we have a word now for tactics with another purpose than gaining wood: technique.