Temposchlucker

 Currently I'm watching the comments on the FIDE candidates tournament 2026. The commentators have an average rating of 2670. During the comments, an eval bar of the position generated by Stockfish is shown. Sometimes (often?) the eval bar shows a different judgement of the position than the commentators. Sometimes the eval bar shows a stubborn 0.0 judgement of the position, while the commentators have a clear preference for one  side which they wish to play. And at other moments the eval bar swings to one side, while the commentators are struggling for minutes to find where the tactic might be hidden in the position. It takes a bit away the mystification that we tend to surround the titles with. Which is a good thing, because we get a chance to get a more realistic and objective view of what is going on. When I started this blog back in 2005, I always was convinced that there was one specific trick that stood out where a grandmaster relied on. Over the years, I unearthed...

 Repertoire books about the opening are geared around the tree of analysis, around variations. But thinking in variations is a quite arduous task. Because the center of gravity of an idea seems to shift through the variations. If you take the idea of an Aurora Australis attack in the Colle Zukertort, then you can reach that attack via quite different move orders. Variations are just too volatile to act as the base for the description of an idea. It is much more logical to gear the description of an idea around the lines of attack (LoAs). The LoAs shift at a much slower pace during the game. Furthermore, the ideas have a close relation to the LoAs. It is a nice idea to give ideas names, like Aurora Australis, Aurora Borealis, Aurora Polaris and Noah's Ark attack, but you can't give every idea a catchy name. It would be handy to give each LoA a separate name though.  Diagram 1. Black to move r1b2rk1/p1qn1ppp/1p1bpn2/2ppN3/3P1P2/1P1BP3/PBPN2PP/R2Q1RK1 b - - I dubbed this position...

 The direct goal of a tactic is to gain wood or to mate the king. Often, a tactic is used to obtain a certain positional goal. Which is an indirect use of a tactic. We talk often about patterns without an exact definition of what we mean by that. The tactical patterns are all well known, but when they are combined with a certain goal, new patterns arise. If the goal has a high frequency of occurrence, these combinatorial patterns will have too. Getting the upperhand on a LoA (line of attack) is a very frequent occurring positional goal, which happens in each and every game. Let's have a look. Diagram 1.Black to move (!) r1bqk2r/pp3ppp/2nbpn2/2ppN3/3P4/1P1BP3/PBP2PPP/RN1QK2R b KQkq - 0 1 Beware, although it is black to move, the diagram is projected from whites perspective! I'm trying to investigate the important LoA's in the Colle Zukertort. In the previous post, I drew some arrows which highlighted these LoA's. According to Stockfish, there are 12 perfectly playable mo...

 Let's start with a typical Aurora attack in the Colle Zukertort. This is how it might work: Diagram 1. White to move r4rk1/pbqn1ppp/1p1bpn2/2ppN3/3P1P2/1P1BP3/PBPN2PP/R2Q1RK1 w - - 2 4 Remember what we try to accomplish: finding the preconditions. The preconditions are related to the LoA landscape. Let me first map the obvious LoAs (lines of attack). Diagram 2. White to move. The LoAs What do we see? blacks Nf6 messes with two LoAs The long diagonal is clogged up The first thing to look at is can we clear the long diagonal with tempo? 1.Nxd7 1. ... Qxd7 (Aurora Australis) 1. ... Nxd7 (Aurora Borealis) Let's assume the Aurora Australis 2.dxc5 2. ... bxc5 2. ... Bxc5 2. ... Be7 (the lesser evil, giving up a pawn) Let's assume that 2. ... Bxc5 is played. Then we get the following position after 1.Nxd7 Qxd7 2.dxc5 Bxc5 Diagram 3. White to move r4rk1/pb1q1ppp/1p2pn2/2bp4/5P2/1P1BP3/PBPN2PP/R2Q1RK1 w - - 0 6  3.Bxf6           getting rid of the defend...

 I retired in Januari. Since then, I have mainly been busy to organize my life in accordance with the new situation (planting geraniums). I played my games on two clubs, but besides that, I haven't studied new material. Although I maintain the current stuff. Yesterday, I subscribed for a 9 day round robin tournament in July. And now the question is: how am I going to prepare for the tournament the coming months? The last tournament in december had a clear conclusion: 1/3 of my points I lose by tactics while 2/3 I lose by molesting endgames. Losing should read as not winning.  If I would worry about points, then focusing on the endgame would be the logical path to go. But I don't consider endgames as being problematic. It is only a lot of work. And even that remains to be seen. My problem is that I lack an endgame plan most of the time. And without a plan, tactics have no direction. The past weeks I have been quite successful as white. I won three times in a row with a bishop s...

 Robert stated: " If the patterns (principles/”rules”/whatever) are  NOT  embedded in LTM, then it is highly likely that we will NOT “SEE” the available options. " This is the core conclusion of this blog. It might not be immediately obvious what this means for our training. The following diagram makes this perfectly clear: Diagram 1. Black to move r3r1k1/1p3pp1/p5N1/P1p3n1/6b1/2N1P1B1/1PQ2PKP/R4R2 b - - 0 22 Pal Benko vs. Wolfram Hartmann (1984) I hesitated between Bh3+ and Bf3+. I thought it was equal, ceteris paribus. Admittedly, it was 6:00 am this morning and I just woke up. But that are the perfect moments to show you what has been absorbed and what not! What a grandmaster has absorbed doesn't disappear when he is drunk or sleep-drowsy. As long as these two moves look the same at first glance, I haven't absorbed the patterns. And that has dire consequences! What you haven't absorbed, you can't SEE during calculation. Diagram 2 is from my game yesterday. ...

 A close inspection of my last post revealed that I probably mix up two things. The plan of a tactic is revealed by its last scenario. The main study task is twofold: discover all scenarios in the chain of the logical narrative discover all the effects of each scenario I mix this up with my observations of the games at the Tata Chess tournament.. Essentially that works the same, but the end of the scenario-chain is not the gain of wood, but an assessment of the resulting position. Which I called the plan. Back to tactics. The last post was about the first point, discovering all scenarios, and especially the last scenario. But during my training I discovered that point two is a problem too, seeing all the ins and outs of a single scenario. Let me give an example. Black to move 5rk1/p3ppbp/1q1pb1p1/1N3r2/2PB1Qn1/1P4P1/P3PPBP/R4RK1 b - - 0 1 Parligras, Mircea vs. Nielsen, Peter Heine This is a problem of my database, and Chessable presents it to be on a spaced repetition basis. I thin...