Look Deeper!

Sometimes when you first look at a position you have a candidate move that you would like to play, but it doesn’t appear that it works, so you simply dismiss it.

Here’s a great example of such a position from a game of mine five years ago.

It’s black to move, and I really wanted to play 12…a4 here.  But it looks like it just hangs to the knight, right?

I looked at 12…a4 13.Nxa4

Here of course I can sack the exchange, but I didn’t see a follow up.  Yes, I can win the c pawn with something like 13…Bxc4 14.Bxc4 Nxc4

Without a doubt I’m a bit better here, but the attack is gone.  It didn’t seem like enough so I just tossed 12…a4 aside.

What I should have done was look deeper.  After all, there are other ways of undermining White’s pawn structure which don’t require me to sack the exchange at all.

Had I looked deeper, perhaps I’d have found the following:

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

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One thought on “Look Deeper!”

  1. The title of this blog post is misleading. It’s not at all looking deeper!
    It’s another nice example of changing the move order.

    With other words, if you see a candidate move but it doesn’t seem to work try to make it work with changing the order of the moves. If then no reasonable solution comes up you can say the candidate move isn’t the right one and continue to calculate another candidate move.

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