Quality Chess Blog

In a recent review of Nikos’s and my book Playing the French (on ChessVibes and Chess.com), the reviewer Arne Moll expresses some doubt about our understanding of practical chess. You can read the review if you are interested in the detail of the argument and in my reply (given below). But I wanted to give a little thought to the difficulty of being Black in general.

As most of you will have noticed, playing an inferior position is perilous. A mistake in a slightly better position can be annoying, but a mistake in an inferior position can land you in trouble you cannot solve. I will write more about this in the near future, but for now let us just continue as if this hypothesis is indeed a fact.

When you are Black your games will in general fall into two categories. Either your opponents will play sidelines or mainlines. This leads to two different challenges.

Mainlines have a tendency to lead to positions where accuracy is important. New ideas will exist in most positions, but mainlines are popular because of the pressure they put on Black (and Black’s success in neutralizing it). For this reason we often need a lot of theoretical knowledge to defend the black side. It is either this or risk your life in variations where you are worse and the problems you have to solve are harder to solve (because deciding between two inferior positions is harder than deciding between a decent and an inferior position).

Sidelines tend to offer you a number of decent options, all of them leading to decent positions. Unless White has played something problematic, he will not be worse either. In such situations exact knowledge usually decreases in value. Unless we play correspondence chess, it is almost impossible to anticipate what sidelines you will face in your next few tournaments, so extensive knowledge has a tendency to be overkill. Working on your problem solving abilities will be more likely to help you once you end in a respectable sideline.

This is the approach Nikos and I chose for our book. This is the philosophy behind it. It is absolutely up for debate, but our approach is not random.

For the full review of Playing the French, go to: review

Reading this review, I felt it was one long question, asking: why did they offer this line? This post below is my answer, not meant as a criticism of the reviewer. Read more…

This is absolutely astonishing. Black wins in a really beautiful way. Very, very hard to find. I mean very hard. Let’s take the solution in the new year!

Thank you all for playing along!

In some countries the presents are opened on Christmas Eve, in others 1-2 days later. Luckily every day is Christmas here on the QC blog. Now back to work Colin, Andrew and you, Mr Bob Cratchit!

More candidates. Imagination is necessary to enjoy Christmas, after we did the hard work on the endings. White to play and make Black’s life entirely miserable.

Behind this door we find a very promising position. But pay attention!

Sometimes it is Christmas in January and sometimes not. I feel for Adam Hunt who failed to crown a decent chess career with a victory against a World Champion…

With one student rated about 2600 I recently had a session where he had failed to solve a lot of his homework. When I asked him the three questions, he would then almost instantly solve half of the positions he had previously failed to solve . Obviously he had the advantage of having spent time working on them already, but it still shows that when you are stuck, making a simple analysis about what is important in the position, just to aim your mind in the right direction, can be extremely useful.

A quick updated publishing schedule for Winter/Spring 2014. There are a lot of projects down the road that have not been forgotten. Kotronias has worked a lot on the KID and we hope a Mar Del Plata book will be ready late spring, but who knows. It is a big project. Also, GM6A and GM6B will happen. We have dates and material ready for working on it. We have long term plans for books on the Nimzo and QID, but again, long term has not been a stable experience for us.As always, this is the intentions; reality might be very different. Who knows :-).