Giri Is a Fighter

Yeah, yeah…Giri + Any Opponent = Draw.

I’ve heard it all before a thousand times.  And sure, in the 2016 Candidates tournament he completed the Full Giri and drew all of his games.  But his play tends to run anything but lifeless.

Here’s an excellent game from back in January at Wijk.  I particularly enjoy the way he plays this opening.  It’s rare to see any of the non-g3 lines in the English these days.

This game is a strategic masterpiece.

Here’s a nice video made by Agadmator.  If you’re not familiar with him you would do well to subscribe to his YouTube channel.  His videos are always entertaining and instructive.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

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Even Blitz Games Are Important

One thing I was told a long time ago is that it’s important to even review your blitz games.  To at least look at them quickly with an engine to see where the huge swings are and then to analyze those swings.

The idea is to figure out what you saw and what you missed and how you properly or improperly evaluated certain positions.

Immediately after playing this game my impression was that I won quite easily with a devastating attack.  I sacked some material and then quickly overwhelmed my opponent on the kingside.

But then I pulled up the pgn to take a quick look at it with an engine and the truth is that I completely misplayed this game.

Interestingly this is the same theme that just caused me to have such as terribly tournament.  I rushed rather than building up small advantages.

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.

Worst Tournament of My Life

I just finished the worst tournament of my life.  Going 1-3 with all games played against lower rated players I managed in the course of one event to shed around 70 rating points, dropping all the way down into the 1650’s!

There are two good takeaways from it however.

The first is that it’s over!  At least I can’t lose any more games in the one.

The second is that in all three losses I had good positions, including an almost winning position on the white side of the Dragon in one, and then lost because I rushed.

Rather than taking time and increasing the pressure on my opponent I tried to force things instantly and went for knockout blows that just weren’t there.

While I’m being somewhat glib about the first takeaway, the second gives me something to work on.  I need to work on technique.  I need to go through some well annotated wins and especially some strategic crushes to really learn to work on the continued accumulation of advantages in better positions.

I’ll have some positions from the games I played annotated and will post them at some point in the near future.

While I’m not happy with my results at all, I’m also not overly upset as I’ve done this twice before where I’ve had massive 150+ point ratings swings in a short period of time in either direction.

So I know I can dig my way out of this.

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.

Rethinking an Endgame Idea

Lately I have been working through Jonathan Hawkins’ excellent book From Amateur to IM which discusses how through learning certain endings very well the author went from around 2000 to an IM.  He’s now a strong GM so improvement has continued to this day.

In one of the chapters he gives this position:

Here he invites the reader to place a black bishop anywhere you’d like on the board.  If you’re like me you probably were immediately drawn to the d4 square.

After all, doesn’t that look strong?  The bishop and the pawn protecting one another…surely that’s the best setup possible, right?

Well, as it turns out, no.  With the bishop on the same color square as the pawn the plan for White becomes to maneuver until you can exchange the rook for the bishop and pawn and transition into a won king and pawn ending.

When the bishop is on the color other than the pawn then the bishop and the pawn complement one another by attacking different color squares and it becomes possible to hold.

I invite the reader to try it for themselves with these two positions against an engine or a friend.

Loss

Draw

Now if faced with a position such as this you would know what to play if you had this position.

If you were White and it was your move you’d know to play d4.  If you were Black and it were your move you’d know that you would need to get …d4 in so you’d play …Kc5 in order to be able to make …d4 unstoppable.

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.

Heartbreaking Loss

With the US Championships getting up to full speed I was watching some of the games today.  One that I was keeping an eye on was between the up and coming Jennifer Yu and the defending US Women’s Champion Sabina Foiser.

It had been a fairly level game all day, and this position was reached

It’s Black to move.  With Black’s king where it is, the ideal plan would be to exchange pawns and then Black should be able to hold quite easily.

But it’s not easy to exchange pawns.  And of course it looks like White can put her king on h4 and then how can Black save the pawn?  With two connected passed pawns the win becomes trivial for White.

So here Sabina played 53…h4+?? and was lost after 54.Kh3.

However, in the original position Black can play 53…Rb1, and now if White tries to win the h pawn with 54.Kh4 Black simply plays 54…Rh1+ 55.Kg3 Rf1 and that should be enough to hold.

Chess is brutal sometimes.  Caissa giveth, and Caissa taketh away.

Here’s hoping that Sabina rebounds tomorrow.

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 Fun Endgame Position to Analyze

I am starting to read GM Jonathan Hawkins’ book From Amateur to IM in which he details how he went from a club player of approximately 2000 Elo to an IM with two GM norms (and of course has been a GM for a few years now) in a span of around eight years.

Spoiler alert…he did it by learning endgames very deeply.

One of the positions from the second lesson, “A Short Introduction to Planning in the Endgame” is this one between Bent Larsen and Slavoljub Marjanovic from the Bled/Portoroz Interzonal in 1979.

Here it’s white to move.  In walking the reader through the plans for each side Hawkins makes it clear that White would like to play h5 since that will damage the Black structure in a way which will both create better squares for his knights while also loosening up the Black king a bit.

He also makes it clear that if Black plays …h5 then White’s job gets much harder.

However, there is a problem with the immediate 58.h5 for White.  That would allow Black to play 58…Ra3 and then 59…Rb7 which would likely force an exchange of rooks, and any exchange of rooks would greatly favor Black as he would be the only one left with a major piece.

So Larsen plays 58.Rd5

Here the Let’s Check feature in Chessbase shows that pretty much every engine that’s ever analyzed deeply prefers 58…h5, but instead Marjanovic played 58…R4a6.  Eventually he lost the game.

The positions after either 58.h5

Or 58.Rd5 h5

Both of these are quite useful to analyze.  I encourage you to do so!

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.

An Update on What I’ve Been Up To

I managed to go a month without posting anything until just a few days ago.  So what was I doing with my time?

As it turns out, there were a couple of things that I was up to.

The first is that I am working on doing more organizing.  Tournaments don’t organize themselves, so I am working on becoming a better organizer and TD.

Second, I have been getting back in the swing of writing.  As I write a regular column in American Chess Magazine I do spend a bit of my time there.

Mostly though, what I’ve been doing is working hard on openings.  Yes, you  read that right…I’m working on openings.

I’ve changed my repertoire a few times over the years, and I went from 1.e4 to 1.d4 to 1.c4 to 1.Nf3.

Now I think I’ve settled on what I want to play going forward.  You’ll see me start to post some games and you’ll figure it out pretty quick.  One thing I did though is I took a look at what I was doing during the times I was gaining the most rating, and I decided to place the focus there.

I expect that as always I will get some terrible positions as I retool my openings, but the main difference is that when I’ve changed my repertoire in the past I’ve never bothered learning it deeply.  Now I am.

So we’ll see where all this leads, but I, for one, am excited.

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.

Calculation Training with IM Andrey Ostrovskiy

I’ve really been fascinated by this guy since I first heard about him on Ben Johnson’s podcast Perpetual Chess.  You can hear that interview here.

One of the things that Ben touched on, either on that episode or the one with Pepe Cuenca, was how strong players go about analyzing and solving puzzles.  Essentially instead of just thinking about moves they first spend a few moments getting a feel for the features of the position.

Since hearing this I have been working on doing that myself.  One of the ways I’ve been trying to teach myself to do that is by watching some of IM Ostrovskiy’s videos in which he does exactly this.

Watch this video.  You will not be disappointed.

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.

Your Opponent Has a Plan Too

This topic came up in a discussion yesterday after the Hales Corners Challenge XXVII tournament.  We were cleaning up, and a friend of mine who hovers around 1900 said this was something that he struggles with.

We talked about the three questions for a bit and how to develop the habit of always asking those questions.

For those who don’t know, the three questions are part of Jacob Aagaard’s training method and our outlined in his book Grandmaster Preperation: Positional Play.  They are as follows:

  1. What are the weaknesses?
  2. What is your worst placed piece?
  3. What is your opponent’s idea?

Now of course you need to also extrapolate additional info from those questions.  For instance, when you are looking for the weaknesses in the position you should be looking for both your own and your opponents.  When you look at your worst placed piece you should also look to see what your opponents is as well.

We talked about how one of the better methods for ingraining the three questions is to analyze games and just openly ask yourself the three questions on every move.  Within a quite short period of time the questions will simply become second nature.  I plan on doing this myself since I know that while I have gotten better at this, it’s still not an intrinsic part of my thought process.

So this morning I decide to go through more Petrosian games and lo and behold what do I see but an example of question three right away.

Tigran is playing Black against the Argentinian GM Pilnik in this position.  It is White to move.

Here Pilnik plays 17.Bd3

At first this struck me as odd since Petrosian wants to put the knight on d6 and chase the knight from b5 in order to reduce White’s play on the queenside which will allow him to better exploit his strong center as well as having the semi open b file from which to potentially attack the white b pawn in the future.

But then after 17…Nd6 18.Qe2 I realized that 17.Bd3 was an example of question three since after 18.Qe2 the knight doesn’t have to move since there is no more threat for Black to win a pawn if White doesn’t move the knight.

The three questions in action.

If you would like to see the entire game, here you are:

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.

Become a Patreon Supporter

I decided to start a patreon page in hopes of getting some donations to help me take lessons regularly.  I know that a lot of people follow my exploits, and I hope that I provide some entertainment to you!  I also hope that you are learning along with me.

I’m at the point where I really need to be able to take lessons regularly.  That’s where I hope you come in.  Any monies donated will be used for me to improve.  To take lessons mostly, and maybe to play in better tournaments if I can raise enough.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

I genuinely appreciate you all, and I plan on being back to posting regular content.  Trust me when I say I’ve been hard at work.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott