I played at the East Devon Chess Congress earlier this year alongside my
longstanding friend and team-mate Charlie Keen. During a break between
games, we went over one of his encounters, looking for tips for next
time. The critical position was this one:
You might get more out of the discussion below, if you try and decide
for yourself what you would play here.
Decided? Now read on…
This was the game to that point:
Later I got this email:
“Please see attached, You had wondered if 23. fg was wrong, but in fact
it turns out that 20. g4 was wrong, and the annotated variation starting
20. Be2 is the way to play this position. 20. g4 cost 150cp and nearly
the game, but for the clock. You did not think twice about g4, nor did I.
How to spot this sort of error in advance?”
Never one to let a rhetorical question lie, let’s have a look, shall
we?
This was the game continuation:
This was Fritz’ recommendation, a pawn-and-a-half better in outcome,
according to Charlie:
[I will say my feeble old version of Fritz gives Charlie’s move as +1.0
and the alternative as +1.5.]
1. Just to remark before getting stuck in, no chess player can be
expected to get very far if they don’t “think twice” about their moves,
unless it is “QxQ checkmate”. There are pros and cons about many moves,
and often you have to take risks to beat opponents of a similar calibre
to your own, so thinking more than once is recommended on occasion.
(Chess is the art of creating positions that are too hard for your
opponents, but if your opponent is as good as you are, there’s probably
an element of risk involved…) On the other hand, the clock is ticking,
and there is pressure to play promptly, so let’s make the natural moves
quickly and think only when we have to…
2. Hindsight is a great teacher. Let’s look at the pros and cons of
that move 20.g4:
PRO:
Grabs space on the King’s-side
Prepares to grab more space on the King’s-side
Prepares to open lines on the King’s-side
Gains time by attacking the Knight
Forcing (so easy to analyse)
CON:
Abandons pawn control of f4
Prepares to open lines on the King’s-side (they are two-way streets!)
We can see with hindsight that the cons of the game continuation did
become manifest on the board. Thinking this way, hindsight today might
become foresight tomorrow. We might, indeed, spot the error in advance.
3. Is there anything general, and generalisable, that we can say about
the incorrect text move? And is there anything general, and
generalisable, about the correct Fritz suggestion?
If you had to describe the theme of the game, we might file it under
Attacking the King castled on the same side, which presents
problems when we are trying to open lines.
We can see in the Fritz line that Black got some counterplay when the
Black Queen was able to occupy the h-file before White.
Moreover, if you contrast the White and Black campaigns, you might say
Attacker and Defender. But let’s refine this to:
Attacking with Bishops and Defending with Knights.
In the game, Black’s Knight, solidly placed on f4, was a real nuisance
to White. We can also see in the Fritz line something of the generally
recommended strategy for fighting with Bishop(s) against Knight(s),
namely, the Knights must be denied stable squares. Here’s the technique
in a fairly pure form, although Steinitz later chose to swap the
advantage of Bishop over Knight for other chances:
With that discussion in mind, the strength of the Fritz line, and the
principles that underlie it, becomes clear. White builds up more slowly,
denying the Knight a place to squat, and not opening the position to the
risk of our own King. And, I hope, this sort of reflection is what might
help us spot such errors in advance.
4. What, in the end, is the lesson of this game? Perhaps it’s more than
something about Bishops and Knights, viz.:
just as rehearsing tactical examples widens the variety of tactical
opportunities (and mistakes) that we are likely to notice at the board,
familiarity with a wide variety of strategical examples is likely to do
the same thing for our positional decisions.
Comments invited!