Quality Chess Blog

Before we get to the article, please have a look at these few positions and try to find the best move.

[fen size=”small”]2r1nrk1/p1q2p1p/1pppb1p1/4b3/P1P1P2Q/BPNR2NP/2P3P1/R5K1 b – – 0 19[/fen]

Black to play

[fen size=”small”]5q1k/p4rnp/2Np4/4b1B1/5p2/3Q3P/6P1/1R5K w – – 0 41[/fen]

White to play

[fen size=”small”]8/Q6p/3p1qk1/8/8/7P/8/7K b – – 0 51[/fen]

Black to play – How many moves to win?

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Our competitors are so desperate that they have hired spies to work out what we are looking at, at the moment.

Luckily John was on his lunch break, reading Krugman’s column. So nothing was revealed.

On an unrelated note, there is a mistake in the Slav book. In one diagram White has pawns on a2, b2 and b3. With 2.c4 on the board, this was some achievement! Blame me…

My good friend, Danish Women’s Team Coach Thomas Schou-Moldt has written an article in Danish on the benefits of training. In this case based on the Yusupov books and a recent game he won in the Danish league. I am not sure how many will benefit from this, as it is written in Danish but I found it fun. Not sure how Google translate will work, but at least the chess moves will be easy to understand.

http://schou-moldt.dk/blog/2014/02/traening-betaler-sig-part-i/

Danish GM Peter Heine Nielsen, whose job it is to second Carlsen (a change of job from seconding Anand until Feb 2013) during events, with the exception of the – for him – conflict-of-interest match in Chennai, has written a short portrait of Carlsen in the Danish Federations magazine, Skakbladet.  There are a few passages I thought you guys would find interesting, so I am quoting randomly:

I seconded him for the first time in the 2005 World Cup. It was probably a surprise for everyone excluding Carlsen that he would get a big breakthrough. At least, I had book my flight so I could make it back to play in the Bundesliga the following weekend. But as a 14-year-old he was already ready to fight the world elite and qualified as the youngest ever to the Candidates Tournament.

This was my first experience of the Carlsen family’s approach to chess. The aim was constantly positive curiosity. I was banned from in any way pushing him to prepare or to in any way give him the impression that it was an important tournament.

The fun based approach came to the extreme in connection with the cooperation with Kasparov. After a few good training sessions the cooperation stopped, when Magnus was given homework!

He is a very independently thinking World Champion, who is not scared of going against cemented dogmas. World Championship matches have long been fought with deep opening analysis and lots of seconds, but Carlsen won the title with only fellow Norwegian Jon Ludvig Hammer helping him via Skype. Even Fischer had a bigger machine assisting him!

Nope! Here it is.

Another month gone by – another publishing schedule. Well, this time I feel that we are really going to live up to the short term ambitions.

I have included only those books we will publish in the spring; not titles that we will do later on, such as The Semi-Slav, Nimzo-Indian, GM6A and GM6B. Be patient. I want the focus this time to be mainly on the titles we are publishing in the next 3-5 months.

A few details are in order. First of all, the author of the Grandmaster Repertoire 1.e4 series is Indian Grandmaster Parimarjan Negi. He is well-known for becoming a grandmaster at the age of 12 and these days known as a very strong grandmaster (peak rating 2671) and an excellent theoretician. A lot of the material for the first volume is written already, with the usual high quantity of new ideas. I am personally very happy with what I have seen and I am sure our audience will be very happy with this material as well.

In the first volume Negi will cover white replies to the Caro-Kann, French and Philidor. The first two are the main openings of course and naturally we will be asked a lot about what lines he suggests. Basically it is 3.Nc3 and the main stuff against both. This means 7.Qg4 in the Winawer, 4.e5 against 3…Nf6 and the long variations in the 4…Bf5 Caro-Kann.

Of other things I can say that Endgame Play will be the biggest book in the Grandmaster Preparation series so far. It is in the same style; it is not an endgame manual, but about 444 exercises in all aspects of the endgame. I have felt that this was a very difficult book to write, but I still hope that it will be very interesting for the readers. Traditionally people do not really buy opening books, so I have gone in to this with a pure artist approach of writing for myself and the 3-5 readers likely to ever make it cover to cover!

Chess from Scracth is the old Soviet beginner book. Kasparov learned chess from it; Dvoretsky wrote the forword for the Russian version.

While looking at the 2014 leaflet, I noticed that with 1.e4 it is Black who decides what the opening is called, while with 1.d4 this is not the case as frequently (Catalan v Queen’s Gambit, Nimzo/QID/Catalan). Obviously we have a Scotch/Italian/Ruy Lopez issue, but I cannot really think of any other 1.e4 opening where it is not Black that decides?!

I know I had promised to put up Part II of Ray’s question, but I have been hit by a wave of energy over the last few days and have spent it all on ENDGAME PLAY, which looks like it will be ready for publication around the 30th April or something like that. I might even have some early copies with me to the Danish Championship in Skorping, though I cannot guarantee this.

For today, I just wanted to underline the importance of studying imagination. Essentially, imagination covers all things non-standard. It is outside the usual pattern recognition or calculation, and thus does not fit into some of the more popular current models of the game. However, it is an important part of Dvoretsky’s teaching and I ahve always taken it very seriously. Solving is definitely a way to improve your imagination.

As an exercise,  take a look at this position and think of a good idea for White (it is deep and White is by no means winning).

Goganov – Andersen, Yerevan 2014

[fen size=”small”]r3kb1r/pp1b2pB/1q2pp2/n2pB2n/3P4/2N1P3/PPQ2PPP/R3K1NR w KQkq – 0 13[/fen]

White to play – What is the trickiest move?

Let us add an exercise that looks a bit the same, but is both easier and more fun!

Vigorito – Kelleher, US 2011

[fen size=”small”]2rqkb1r/pp1b3p/2n1pp2/3p2pn/3P3B/P1NBPN2/1PQ2PPP/R3K2R w KQk – 0 15[/fen]

 White to play and win

Some months ago we had a question on the blog (quoted below in italics) and I wanted to come back to it for a while, I was just really stressed out and on auto-pilot (yes this is also why I have not completed Endgame Play; I did not want it to be a bad book). But having gone through a five-day juice detox, I feel human again.

I will answer this question in two columns, as there are two games to relate to. The other one will come next Monday.

“Interesting column and game! What struck me especially is your comment that you chose a move which you knew was bad, because you bended with respect to another variation. I would like to share a similar experience I had in two of my own national league games, only it went the other way around, i.e., I chose for unclear/dubious complications against my (lack of) intuition. In the most recent one (played some weeks ago) I was White against a 2300 opponent:
 

1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.e4 Nc6 4.Nf3 Bg4 5.d5 Ne5 6.Bf4 Ng6 7.Be3 Nf6 8.Bxc4 a6 (I had prepared the pawn sacrifice 8…Nxe4 at home. It is very dangerous for black, so he played after some thought a move which I hadn’t looked at at home) 8…a6 9.Nbd2 Ne5 (this came as a surprise to me. I had mostly looked at 9…e5 which would have transposed to known territory). 10.Be2 Nxf3+ 11.Nxf3 e6 12.h3 Bxf3 13.Bxf3 exd5 14.e5 Ne4 15.Bxe4 (the computer prefers 15.0-0 +/=) 15…dxe4 16.Qb3?! (I had seen black’s reply, but I hadn’t calculated deeply enough to see that this is very dangerous for white. The originally planned 16.Qa4 and 17.Qxe4 gives white a risk-free edge, since I have a kingside pawn majority supported by centralised heavy pieces, which should give me good attacking chances. Still I chose for the more risky route. I should have remembered Nunn’s advice ‘don’t analyse unnecessary tactics’ – I’m still wondering why I didn’t just play the safe move.). 16…Qd3! 17.Qxb7 Rd8 18.Bg5? (a horrible move played without much deep thought, giving away all the dark squares around my king to my opponent. I could still have bailed out with 18.Qc6+ with a draw. The computer suggests 18.a3 with a slight plus for white. This is a clear case of bending to me; I stopped calculating after black’s 21st move, but in reality that position is already more or less lost for white. Black’s king is much safer than white’s). 18…Be7! 19.Bxe7 Kxe7 20.Qxc7+ Rd7 21.Qc5+ Ke6 22.Qe3? (22.h4 is relatively best). 22…Rc8 23.Qxd3 exd3 (with a won position for black. He finishes it off in an instructive manner) 24.f4 Rc2 25.0-0 Rxb2 26.a4 d2 27.Rad1 Rd4 28.a5 Kf5 29.Rf2 Ke4 30.Rf3 Rd3 31.Rf2 Kd4 32.Kf1 Kc3 33.Ke2 Rb4 34.Rf3 Re4+ 35.Kf2 Kc2 36.Rxd3 Kxd3 37.Ra1 Rxf4+ 38.Kg3 Rc4 0-1.

While it seems clear which mistakes I made in these particular games, I have the following question Jacob: what is in your opinion the best way to train to change this habit of choosing for complications even though you have the feeling it’s kind of suicidal? Which of your books is/are best suited to work on this?

Sorry for this long post, but you kind of invited the readers to no be shy :-). Besides, it is on topic for a change :-).”

My Comments:

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