Clockwork openings

By -
There are some systems where one side knows what he's going to play, more or less regardless of what's happening on the other side of the board. Usually it's White who has this luxury, and usually he's playing for some sort of automatic kingside attack. You know the sort of thing - a King's Indian Attack, or Grand Prix Attack, or one of the Colle / London / Stonewall type setups.

It can be rather annoying to play against this stuff. Not that it's objectively so frightening; but practically speaking White is likely to get his attack, and probably also an advantage on the clock in a type of position that he plays every week - and that's not to be sniffed at.

Nevertheless, my approach in defending against all this is generally to allow, or even encourage, White to do what he wants to do. I tell myself that so long as I haven't made any serious mistakes then there's no reason that his attack should deserve to succeed; and that if and when it fails then I have every chance of being better. This seems to me to be the principled approach: I don't believe that you can expect to play automatic moves and checkmate me, and to prove the point I'm going to let you try.

Sometimes, this goes wrong.



Here I have willingly accepted a pawn, and if I find 18. ... Re8 then I ought to be able to hold on to it. But instead, after 18. ... Qd7? 19. Bxf6 h5 20. Bxg7:



... I was still labouring under the misapprehension that I should be winning. Therefore I rejected 20. ... Kxg7 21. Qc3+ f6 22. Rxf6 Rxf6 23. Qxf6+ Kh7 with equality, and instead played 20. ... hxg4? - completely missing 21. Bf6! and losing quickly.

Yes, being principled, and even being right, is all very well; but you still have to play good moves.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Boring System

By -
When you go out to play a game of chess, what do you hope for? A win would be nice, naturally, and I don't suppose many of us would keep playing unless we won a few. But there's little satisfaction in beating much weaker opponents, so we must want more than that. Being made to think, seeing ideas that we haven't seen before, taking the other guy on in a real struggle... isn't that what it's about? How, then, to explain a game like this? White plays the dullest opening he can think of; Black goes along with it. White offers a draw at move 15. Move 15! The position more than justifies the offer, and if we were two grandmasters playing for prize money, well, maybe it would all be understandable. But this is two club players trying to spend their evening doing something they enjoy. I played on a while in the hope that something would happen, but it never looked likely. Can either of us enjoyed this game? I know that I didn't. Well, people will play the Lo...
Read more

Playing away

By -
Over at the Streatham & Brixton blog, Tom has been running a series of How To Improve type posts. I'm a bit slow off the mark, but a couple of them caught my eye, for differing reasons. The first was his recommendation to practise with a real board , setting up conditions to be as similar to tournament play as you can manage. I expect it's good advice; if nothing else it sounds like awfully hard work and I've a nasty feeling that this is the main thing that's required if you're serious about improving. What it reminded me of, though, was a match a year or two ago over at Wanstead (I think). I was playing a board or two below fellow-blogger kingscrusher, who had presumably been spending rather too much time playing online. Half an hour or so in he takes me to one side and says something like: "Dave, this over the board stuff, I'm finding it a bit unfamiliar. The thing is, it's very... it's very realistic isn't it?". Well, it mad...
Read more

Seeing ghosts

By -
Why do I play bad moves? For many different reasons, no doubt, which makes it that much harder to stop doing it. A mistake that I find myself repeating, though, is to misevaluate a perfectly acceptable position as being slightly worse, and consequently play some inferior move to avoid it. In last week's game, for example, 9 ... Be7 was quite unnecessary. I was afraid that my pawns would be doubled and my king exposed after 9 ... Nc6 10 Bxf6; but in fact Black is fine here, and the exchange on f6 doesn't seem to be unfavourable at all. Instead I went into a sequence of exchanges and a very dull position. This week I'm White, and at move 12 I suddenly start to worry that things aren't going well. My opponent, my computer, and the cold light of day have all since convinced me that a normal move such as 12. Rb1 is just fine; but during the game it felt as though I was walking into some sort of disadvantage. So I decided to try and confuse matters, offering a pawn with...
Read more