Category: Improvement

Here’s what looks to be a typical position:

The game is from Budapest 1996 and is between Jacob Aagaard and Istvan Almasi.

In his most recent book Thinking Inside the Box Aagaard says that this was apparently from a Petrosian game, and here Petrosian played the normal looking 17.Rad1. (Side note – I looked but couldn’t find the Petrosian game.)

So I’m looking at this position and thinking, yeah, that’s probably what I’d play. After all, don’t we often just automatically make moves to put our rooks in the center of the board like that? Especially on an open file?

However, the soon-to-be-IM Aagaard realizes that the only thing that is going to happen on the d-file is exchanges. And he doesn’t want exchanges.

So here he plays 17.Re2 in order to double on the e-file and prevent the exchanges he was worried about.  He wins this game in a great attacking style.

The main point of this game is not to show this move.  It’s in the chapter on analyzing your own games, and beyond this there is some detail by Jacob on his difficulties with the French Defense.

However, as someone who has made automatic looking rook moves for years I found this tiny snippet to be incredibly useful.

Here is the game.

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.

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It’s not often that you see a game where someone sacrifices this many pieces. This is one of the greatest games I have ever seen.

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.

Lately I have come to realize that there are two issues that are the main cause of my stagnation for the last couple of years.

In order I believe them to be comparative analysis and evaluation of the resulting positions.

Here is an example from one of my games at the US Open.  Take a look at this position, with Black (me) to move.

Here I became fixated on the idea of 24…Nxd5. I was looking at the idea of 25.exd5 e4

I was thinking that I would wind up with a much better position after something like 26.Qd2 exf3 27.gxf3.

The problem though was that I didn’t look at any other moves.  So I became fixated on this one idea and it became far too east to convince myself that it must be good since it was the only thing I was looking at.

But let’s go back to this:

The problem is that White has a nice intermezzo. Can you find it? It’s at the bottom of this post.

Had I been looking at other candidate moves and comparing them I would have also considered moves such as 24…axb4 or 24..Rc8, etc.

Perhaps I still would have miscalculated and played 24…Nxd5, but I would have had a more open mind. (For the record the real blunder came a few moves later in the game…)

My other issue is evaluation of the resulting positions. Far too often I can’t tell when a position is even versus slightly better or slightly worse.

By “slightly” let’s say like 1.0 in engine evaluation. Of course that can mean a swing of nearly 2.0 on any given move. Let’s say that I have a position that’s 0.00 and one move is +.75 in my favor while the other is -.75 against me. That’s 1.5 in difference.

Sure, most obvious moves I will at least catch. If there is some glaring issue I do tend to notice those. For instance the doubled isolated f pawns resulting in the line I calculated above which my opponent avoided with the zwischenzug. It’s the more subtle things that I need to work on.

I am becoming convinced that the road to 1900 and beyond will be paved with learning to always look at multiple candidate moves.

In order to break 1800 I had to force myself to look at tempo moves all of the time. This seems to be the next step on the path.

Time will tell.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

The intermezzo I missed was

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26.Qc7

I’ve been looking through a ton of GM games lately for various reasons, and in doing so I stumbled across this gem of a game.

The game features a lot of maneuvering with opposite colored bishops until this position is reached:

Here White takes advantage of the opportunity to get queens off while winning a pawn and gaining a mass of center pawns in the process.

After further maneuvering this position appears on the board:

Here Black commits the critical error by playing 69…Bf1, moving the bishop to a square where it doesn’t factor into the defense of the h3-c8 diagonal.  After a few more deft maneuvers on White’s part Black quickly finds his king tied to the defense of a pawn and White’s pawns marauding.

This game is a very Carlsenesque example of how to maneuver until your opponent makes a slight slip which then becomes exploitable.

Here is the entire game.

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.

So I went on quite a run of tactical success with chesstempo.

I solved 29 straight correctly, then finally missed one a few minutes ago.

I do like to solve them rated sometimes to try to work my way up to harder problems.  The only issue I have with them is that often the value for success is little and the punishment for failure is high.

My best guess is that you need a success rate of around 70% just to stay level with where you are.

Either way, one thing I noticed as the streak took hold was that I was giving in to the temptation to guess far less frequently.

I was doing my best to calculate as precisely as I could.  Hopefully that sticks and is a thing now.

1	2018-08-22 11:27:29-05	125369	1641.8	Standard	06:20	01:24	00:39	1664.2 (-3.7)
2	2018-08-22 11:25:55-05	59453	1594.9	Standard	04:06	01:54	00:02	1668.0 (+2.9)
3	2018-08-22 11:23:52-05	147462	1566.6	Standard	02:11	00:29	00:05	1665.1 (+2.7)
4	2018-08-22 11:23:14-05	149889	1518.7	Standard	04:18	03:22	00:02	1662.3 (+2.4)
5	2018-08-22 11:19:09-05	93813	1512.9	Standard	04:44	05:17	00:13	1659.9 (+2.5)
6	2018-08-22 11:13:38-05	26678	1443.7	Standard	01:09	00:11	00:01	1657.5 (+1.9)
7	2018-08-22 11:13:14-05	142574	1378.5	Standard	02:18	00:22	00:04	1655.5 (+1.5)
8	2018-08-21 08:49:35-05	171130	1421.0	Standard	02:37	01:53	01:07	1654.0 (+1.7)
9	2018-08-21 08:47:21-05	21026	1363.1	Standard	01:23	00:17	00:00	1652.3 (+1.4)
10	2018-08-21 08:46:42-05	155987	1429.9	Standard	01:57	00:43	00:04	1650.9 (+2.0)
11	2018-08-21 08:45:44-05	56821	1531.1	Standard	01:12	00:13	00:00	1649.0 (+3.1)
12	2018-08-21 08:45:24-05	96484	1400.7	Standard	01:30	02:09	00:01	1645.8 (+1.9)
13	2018-08-21 08:43:06-05	71566	1580.6	Standard	03:19	01:25	00:37	1643.9 (+4.1)
14	2018-08-21 08:41:29-05	78428	1635.7	Standard	03:31	06:36	00:04	1639.8 (+5.2)
15	2018-08-21 08:34:43-05	106238	1450.1	Standard	02:31	00:50	00:03	1634.6 (+2.8)
16	2018-08-16 12:25:44-05	63352	1410.2	Standard	01:10	00:12	00:01	1631.8 (+1.5)
17	2018-08-16 12:25:20-05	104763	1254.4	Standard	02:17	00:34	00:01	1630.2 (+0.7)
18	2018-08-16 12:24:35-05	171755	1351.3	Standard	01:29	00:23	00:07	1629.5 (+1.2)
19	2018-08-16 12:24:00-05	161587	1494.4	Standard	01:53	00:42	00:03	1628.3 (+2.2)
20	2018-08-16 12:23:11-05	153034	1576.6	Standard	03:30	02:27	00:25	1626.1 (+3.0)
21	2018-08-16 12:20:39-05	64162	1391.7	Standard	01:04	00:33	00:02	1623.1 (+1.5)
22	2018-08-16 12:19:57-05	101172	1191.9	Standard	01:58	00:32	00:05	1621.6 (+0.5)
23	2018-08-16 12:19:16-05	73867	1462.2	Standard	02:16	02:25	00:44	1621.0 (+2.0)
24	2018-08-16 12:16:43-05	63693	1565.7	Standard	01:51	00:38	00:01	1619.0 (+3.0)
25	2018-08-16 12:15:18-05	158628	1657.1	Standard	04:04	03:45	00:47	1616.0 (+4.0)
26	2018-08-16 11:44:33-05	141961	1697.5	Standard	04:48	01:47	00:38	1612.0 (+4.7)
27	2018-08-16 11:42:42-05	100500	1590.5	Standard	02:53	00:52	00:02	1607.3 (+3.7)
28	2018-08-16 11:41:42-05	102930	1558.7	Standard	02:48	01:13	00:38	1603.6 (+3.6)
29	2018-08-16 11:40:03-05	28569	1533.3	Standard	02:38	00:35	00:05	1600.0 (+3.4)
30	2018-08-16 11:39:22-05	77972	1542.9	Standard	02:59	01:02	00:04	1596.6 (+3.7)
31	2018-08-16 11:38:01-05	77796	1535.2	Standard	03:13	06:48	00:00	1592.8 (-5.4)

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.

 

I have been re-reading John Emms’ book Play The Najdorf: Scheveningen Style lately since I play a lot of those lines as Black and I’m a bit rusty since I’ve been playing the Scheveningen proper for some time.

Overall I really like the book, but I came across something that was very sloppy and makes me question the rest of the book.

So the idea is that in this position after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bc4

The main move here is 6…e6, and while the normal White response is 7.Bb3 there are sidelines, particularly 7.a4 which Black can avoid by switching up the move order with 6…b5, which if White then plays 7.Bb3 Black plays 7…e6 and the main position is reached but without White having the 7.a4 option.

So in the position after 6…b5 there is something else White can try other than transposing.  They can play 7.Bd5

Now after 7…Nxd5 8.exd5 Bb7 9.a3 there apparently two main ideas here.  The first involves Black sacking a pawn but gaining complete control over the center.  The second involves the move 9…g6 and then after a series of moves this position is reached:

Here GM Emms uses the phrase “and Black went on to win in Bauer-Kempinski, Bundesliga 2000.”

In the other idea, the pawn sack one, it was easy to see how Black was better, but in this one I didn’t see it.  One of the things that I have really been getting myself to do lately is to question things.  After all, the information is at our fingertips.  So why not look?

So I pulled up the game.  After clicking through it a bit I turned on the engine.  Stockfish 9 64 gives the position 0.00 at a depth of 30 for either 21.Rf3, or the game move of 21.Kd2.

Hmm…nothing there, so what about after the game moves of 21.Kd2 Kc7…what would the engine think then?

Well, as it turns out, here White misses a chance to get an edge.  And certainly White is at least slightly better now.  But instead White blunders horribly with 22.Ng5??

Now granted, this is a side note to a sideline, but still…the implication is that somehow Black is on his way to winning after move 20 in the game.  Yet in truth Black made an inaccuracy in the next move of the game, which was followed by White making a critical blunder the move after.

So at the end of the day…trust, but verify.

Here is the entire game with my notes, most of which come from Stockfish.

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.

Today, for the first time, I missed zero tactics during my training session.

As a reminder, what I’ve been doing is using Andrzej Krzywda’s method  of solving puzzles on chesstempo, but without logging in.  The idea is to just spend 15 minutes a day drilling simple puzzles.

Today I went 14/0, which was kind of nice.

Here are my results so far.  I did miss one day.

Date	Day	Correct/Missed
7/1/2018	Day 1	16/5
7/2/2018	Day 2	16/6
7/3/2018	Day 3	22/4
7/4/2018	Day 4	20/3
7/5/2018	Day 5	11/3
7/6/2018	Day 6	18/3
7/7/2018	Day 7	11/5
7/8/2018	Day 8	12/7
7/9/2018	Day 9	14/5
7/10/2018	Day 10	18/4
7/11/2018	Day 11	15/6
7/12/2018	Day 12	18/2
7/13/2018	Day 13	21/2
7/14/2018	Day 14	16/2
7/15/2018	Day 15	17/5
7/16/2018	Day 16	18/3
7/17/2018	Day 17	11/6
7/18/2018	Day 18	15/3
7/19/2018	Day 19	missed
7/20/2018	Day 20	11/7
7/21/2018	Day 21	13/3
7/22/2018	Day 22	12/5
7/23/2018	Day 23	10/8
7/24/2018	Day 24	8/3
7/25/2018	Day 25	12/5
7/26/2018	Day 26	12/6
7/27/2018	Day 27	14/0

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.