Attacking hotspots

There are a lot of different areas in chess where I can do better. I can't address them all at once. So I have to make choices.

On the one hand I'm highly influenced by progressive insight, while on the other hand, I need the right training material, and I discover new books and videos all the time.

Furthermore, I'm the slave of my curiosity. When I want to know something, I go for it, no matter whether it will bear fruit or not. You can't possibly know beforehand.

Luckily I have most of the time the discipline to finish a few things first before I jump on the next bandwagon.

A few weeks ago, I purchased a new course on Chessable: Attacking hotspots in chess

The author divides the chessboard in four hotspots:

And he has puzzles for every square in every hotspot. On every square he has quite a few sacrifices for every piece: Queen, Rook, Bishop and Knight sacrifices.

These puzzles are a good base to get a deeper insight in the Vukovic gap. Tactics are supportive by their very nature. And tactics that support mate are the strongest. Not every sac culminates into a mate, sometimes the opponent can sort of save himself for the moment by giving up material. But since being a piece ahead usually is enough to win too, the difference is marginal.

With a winning piece sac you can safely assume that the preconditions of Vukovic are met. So I hope that the puzzles will give me a deeper insight in the preconditions, the piece placement and the lines of attack that are involved by the king assault. I will start with studying the sacrifices on h7, g7 and f7.