Category: Improvement

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

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Sometimes in chess we have moves in our games that seem so natural that you think they are obvious. That was the feeling I got looking at this position with White to move.

The game is Mista-Giri from Doha 2014. Giri has just put his knight on a4. Right now the position is dead level. To me it looks like 29.Bxa4 is just screaming to be played. Mista plays it, and Giri recaptures:

Here the position is still dead level. But lets take a serious look at it for a second… White’s a pawn hangs and his b pawn is backward. White can fix these problems by playing 30.Bb6 Nc5 31.Qe3 and now if Black plays 31…Nb3 White starts to reposition with 32.Rg1 and gets ready to start some action on the kingside.

Another way for White to play instead of Bb6 is the more dynamic exchange sac 30.Rxa4 Bxa4 31.Rxa4

I can’t pretend to understand the theory of exchange sacs all that well, but it seems to me that with Black having no obvious pawn breaks being down the exchange shouldn’t matter all that much. Instead of either of those options Mista chose to play 30.Ng3

This hangs the a pawn, and with it eventually the game. Here is the game in it’s entirety.

The lesson from this game is that just because a move looks obvious, unless you have a plan to follow it up with. 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.

Currently I’m reading Jan Timman’s latest book The Longest Game in preparation for a review.

I’ve long spoken about certain modern advantages about buying books that exist today, but didn’t 30 years ago when I first was playing in tournaments. Chief among them the fact that back in the late 80’s you’d see a book title in a catalog, and maybe a two-line description and that’s what you needed to use to decide whether or not to buy something.

These days you can go online and read excerpts along with finding numerous reviews, etc. This is why it’s generally agreed that we’re in a Golden Age for chess books.

However, there’s a huge advantage these days in the reading of chess books which I’d like to talk about a little today.

30 years ago books were the primary source of learning and improvement. Today they are just the springboard.

Let’s take a look at this position from the second game of the first K-K match.

Here Kasparov plays 8.Nh4 about which Timman says “The critical move, which had been introduced into practice by Polugaevsky in 1980. Before that, 8.Nd4 had been the usual move. However, in that case, Black can return the pawn by 8…Nc6 (Korchnoi’s 8…Bc6 is also possible, intending 9.Nxc6 dxc6) 9.cxd5 Nxd4 10.Qxd4 c5 11.Qd2 d6 with a playable Benoni position.”

This is the final position from that note above:

I sat there looking at that and asking myself “But why 11.Qd2 in that position?  Why block in the c1 bishop like that?” And that takes us to the point I want to make today.

Back in the times in which this game was played, when a club player would see a note like that from a GM commentating on a game it didn’t matter if we understood it or not. If you couldn’t reason out the idea behind the move then you just had to move on. You were also limited to the idea fed to you by the annotator of the game. Whatever they decided to mention as alternatives is what you got to look at. The end.

These days we’re not so hampered.  I simply opened ChessBase and put in the moves to take us to this position before 11.Qd2

Here I’m able to do a number of things. First, I run Stockfish 10 which tells me after a depth of 36 that 11.Qd2 is 0.64, 11.Qd3 is 0.60, and 11.Qd1 is 0.60.  OK, so this shows that there’s nothing inherently wrong with putting the queen on d2. My instinct of “but the bishop” is a knee jerk one, but in this day and age I can learn why.

So I go to the reference tab in my database. I can see that in the 8.5 million games in my database this position was reached 19 times and that there have been four moves played. 11.Qd3 has been played twelve times (last played in 1980), 11.Qd2 five times (last played in 1980), and 11.dxc6 (in 1978) and 11.Qd1 (in 1966) once each.

So now we can look at the games in the 11.Qd2 line. Of the five, four are GM games with one taking place between amateurs. If we disregard the amateur game and look at the four games we see that interestingly, Yuri Balashov was white in three of them, with the aforementioned Korchnoi having white in the other game. The players of the black bits were Timman, Inkiov, Furman, and Karpov.

Since Timman mentions Korchnoi, and since it’s the stem game,  let’s look at that game first.

Now let’s look at the four Balashov Whites in chronological order:

So in looking through those games it becomes easy to see that the idea for White was simply to play b3 and then develop the bishop that way. Therefore the queen being on d2 was not a detriment at all.

It’s also interesting to see that Korchnoi’s plan of b3-a4-Rb1-Ba3-b4 was determined to be inferior by Balashov who then developed the bishop to b2 instead. The engine agrees with the analysis as well.

I’m often amused at the view espoused by some that books are somehow outdated due to the fact that we have so many technological tools at our disposal. To me, books are enhanced rather than downgraded by these advances of the modern age.

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.

When they think of Bent Larsen, most American’s probably think “Isn’t he that guy who lost to Fischer 6-0?”

However, there is a lot more to Bent than that footnote would suggest.  He was clearly the second best player in the West for many years behind only Fischer.

In fact, in 1970 during the first “USSR vs The Rest of the World” match, the captain of the World Team, former world champion Max Euwe, had decided that he would use Elo ratings to determine board order.

Bent Larsen would not accept this as Fischer had been inactive for some time at this point and he himself had had several successes leading up to this event.

In a gesture that surprised many, Fischer agreed and stepped down to play Tigran Petrosian on Board Two while Larsen faced world champion Boris Spassky on Board One.

After a draw in their first game, Larsen sat down to the board for Game Two and promptly committed a cardinal sin in the chess world by completely ignoring the center in the second game. This allowed Spassky to create the following miniature.

Take this as a lesson…ignore the center at your own peril!

And yes, these days the Nimzo-Larsen attack (1.b3 or 1.Nf3 2.b3) is often used by strong players, but these days the theory and understanding are quite far advanced compared to where they were when Bent was pioneering this setup.

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.