An Adult Competitors Journey Towards 2200
Tomorrow we’ll look at round four!
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
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Tomorrow we’ll look at round three!
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.
If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter. Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.
Yesterday Magnus Carlsen put the cap on the midway point of a dream year in which he’s won six tournaments already. He finished with eight points from eleven games in the GCT event in Zagreb, Croatia.
This hearkens back to an event ten years ago, the 2nd Nanjing Spring Pearl tournament where Magnus scored the best ever performance rating of 3002 with eight points from ten rounds.
Over the next ten days we will look at those ten games, including his round one win annotated by Magnus himself in Chessbase Magazine 133.
Round One
Carlsen – Leko 1-0
Tomorrow we’ll look at round two!
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.
If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter. Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.
A few years ago I lost a game on the White side of the Slav because my opponent won my c pawn and I went full blown panic thinking I had to win it back immediately rather than let him hold on to the pawn while I built up my position.
Since then I have learned the importance of other elements such as time and space rather than being so materially minded, which is why I can appreciate this game between Sasha Grishchuk and Lev Aronian from Bilbao 2009.
Granted, this game is in a line of the Semi-Slav, but same idea. In this position Black has temporarily won White’s c pawn.
White builds up some nice advantages, and then Black sacs an exchange – I presume since the dark squares around his king look a bit tender.
After some mutual positional pawn sacs being down the exchange proves to be a bit too much for Black and White converts a nice opportunity.
Here is the game, with annotations by the well-known attacker, Polish GM Michal Krasenkow. This comes from Chessbase Magazine issue 132.
If you’re not familiar with Krasenkow you should listen to Ben Johnson’s Perpetual Chess Podcast interview with him here. You can (and SHOULD) order Krasenkow’s recent book on his best games here.
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.
If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter. Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.
One of the things that we learn as we progress in chess is that having more space means having an advantage.
Here is an amazing example where that is not the case. In this game Lautier builds up a sizeable space advantage against the German GM Nispeanu, but at the cost of a lack of king safety.
Nipeanu coolly and calmly maneuvers his pieces into place and then smashes open the position and suddenly Lautier’s advantage becomes a wide open field for his opponents pieces to start charging through.
The annotations are from English GM Peter Wells. This game appears in Chessbase Magazine 130 from June 2009.
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.
If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter. Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.
As many long time readers of mine will know, I have been a fan of the King’s Indian Defense for as long as I can remember.
I currently have a student who really enjoys the King’s Indian and so I was looking for games to show him some brutal crushes from the black side.
Of course seeing as how one of the all time greats was a serious practitioner in his day I figured I’d look up some Kasparov games.
Here are a couple of brutal win by Garry featuring classic kingside attacks.
These types of games never fail to take me back to when I was first discovering my love of top level chess in the late 80’s/early 90’s.
I hope you will enjoy them as well!
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.
If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter. Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.
One of the things that I have been working on lately is a much more thorough approach to my openings. While I have definitely had some growing pains, I am doing better when it comes to working harder to understand my opening repertoire.
I have been playing 1…e5 again lately and the Breyer has been my variation of choice. However, I have wanted to work on some other lines to both better increase my understanding as well as to give myself more weapons in the arsenal.
So I started looking at the Zaitsev.
Here is the main position, which arises after the move 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.O-O Be7 6.Re1 b5 7.Bb3 d6 8.c3 O-O 9.h3 Bb7 10.d4 Re8
The main move here is 12.Nbd2, but it turns out that White has a drawing line if they wish to play it with 12.Ng5
Now the idea is that Black goes back with 12…Rf8 and then after 13.Nf3 Black is either left with repeating with 13…Re8 or playing 13…Nd7. In the games I was looking at the higher rated GM’s playing Black had a tendency to just go back and repeat. These were games from open tournaments where more often than not Black needs to play for a win in order to have a chance to finish well.
I’ll have to look into this more to determine why they wouldn’t play 13…Nd7. In the meantime here are two examples from May of this year.
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.
If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter. Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.
The game Jakovenko-Harikrishna from a few days ago in Shenzhen was quite interesting to me for a couple of reasons.
Here’s one of them. In a Taimanov Sicilian this position is reached with Black to move:
Here the normal move is 8…Ne5. Instead, Harikrishna plays 8…Nxd4 9.Bxd4 Bc5 10.Bxc5 Qxc5 and now after 11.Na4 Qc7 White gets a Maroczy setup with 12.c4
So this is one part of the game that I found interesting. I’m not sure what Black gets out of this, although I suppose it’s equal and that’s what Black has been trying for.
Then down the road a piece this position is reached, this time with White to move:
One of the maxims that we are taught as post beginner’s is that when you’re queen is lined up on the same file as an enemy rook it’s a good idea to move it, but here Jakovanko plays 15.Qd4
OK, so it seems to me like if Black plays 15…e5 here, then White is doing OK since Black has given himself a backwards pawn. As Black I don’t think I’d play 15…e5. But…I’m not a super GM, because what does Harikrishna play? You guessed it…he plays 15…e5
Clearly there are some strategic themes I am not understanding.
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.
If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter. Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.
One of my bigger struggles is looking at a position and not understanding what the most important feature is.
It’s not necessarily that I look at the position and don’t understand the answer to that question – it’s that I often don’t even ask the question.
Take this position for instance:
The game is Aberg-Smith 2012 and it’s Black to move. Take a minute and ask yourself what the most important feature is.
I spent time trying to get the knight to the c4 square. But I never did like the idea of 17…Na3 18.Ra1 Nc4 19.Rxa7 and now Black is in a world of pain.
Then I thought about playing …f5 to try to lock down e4, but that doesn’t do much either.
Here’s the thing though…this game appears in the “no pawn break no plan” chapter of Pump Up Your Rating by Axel Smith. So had I asked myself the question I would have noticed that Black can play 17…e5 right now to undermine White’s c pawn before it gets too dangerous, but that if Black doesn’t do so now, then White will play f4 and that’s that as far as the …e5 break goes.
So after 17…e5 White is forced to take or make serious concessions. Then after 18.dxe5 Bxe5 White is still slightly better, but that c pawn doesn’t look nearly as scary as it did before.
I need to start adding a step where I ask myself in any position I’m analyzing “What is truly the most important feature of this position?” Hopefully if I do so I’ll get in the habit and this will simply become second nature.
Here is the entire game for anyone who is interested.
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter. Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.
If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter. Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.