Temposchlucker

 Citation from an interview with Sindarov in El País "Like Gukesh, the rival he’ll be thinking about night and day from now until the end of the year, and almost all the other chess stars born in the 21st century, Sindarov has not studied the classical masters. He has not read the My Great Predecessors series, where Garry Kasparov, the world champion from 1985 to 2005, meticulously analyzes the best games of the great champions since the 19th century. That book was considered the “Bible of chess,” at the very least essential reading, even for the Norwegian player Magnus Carlsen, the current undisputed number one at 35.   But not for geniuses in their twenties or younger: “It’s very rare that I read books. My coach insists on it, but I prefer that he teach me things at the board. For example, I’ve never looked up games of great champions of the past on my own, like [Cuban player José Raúl] Capablanca [who was champion a hundred years ago] or [Soviet player Mikhail] Bo...

 Complexity arises when I see a lot of dots, but fail to see the connection. I don't see the dots as one, but as many. And since the mind cannot handle many, my mind is easily overwhelmed. That has especially been the case in the opening. I played many openings with white, the Italian, the King's Gambit, all kinds of gambits against the French, the Aljechin, the Caro Kann, the Sicilian, I played the Polar Bear, the London, the Barry Attack, the white Sniper and a lot more of which I forgot the names. I learned little of it. Yeah, a lot of dots, but I failed to see the connection. The past three years, I played the Colle Zukertort. That is a system opening. Meaning that you play the same moves over and over again, no matter what your opponent does. That is a desperate remedy against being overwhelmed by variations.  After three years, I finally get a bit the hang of what I might be trying to accomplish. There are about 20 themes that play a role. The dots are connected to a cer...

  Epaulette mate Swallow's tail mate Dovetail mate

 I play the Colle Zukertort for three years now, and I'm very successful with it. In the previous posts, I told you that I'm ready for the next level, which is deepening my knowledge about the attacks that can be derived from the Colle Zukertort. I mentioned the video I use for that. Basically, it fills in the Vukovic gap. The part of the game between opening and starting to commit your pieces towards the kingside attack. After which there is no going back. The same is true for black. For two years now, I play Hammer's first repertoire with black , by GM Jon Ludvig Hammer. It solved my problem that I always got into trouble with black. Basically it is a simple repertoire against everything meant for players below 1400. But anyhow, it solved my problems with black. I am starting to run into the limits of this repertoire, and I feel the need to replace certain variations with more ambitious lines. The good thing is that I can keep everything else the same. by the way, I won a...

 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...