Bookmarks #5

Just a few fun positions to find a tactic from blitz/bullet games of mine.

White to move

Problem Solving 2

Going to work on four more problems.

But first! Last time on Problem Solving I got the main ideas on the first one but failed to calculate that 1…g5 was the best option, am informed I got 2 and 3 correct, and bungled 4, undervaluing the pressure or 1.Re1. All in all a very solid result on complex positions. I sometimes say the best puzzle solving rate is the lowest your ego can handle, which is somewhere around 50%. But this isn’t quite right, as if you go much lower then you’re probably not engaging with/understanding enough of the problem to learn from the solutions. So I think the ideal rate is probably 50-75%, but if 50% feels terrible to you and 75% feels okay for your ego, try to find problem sets where it’s 75% not 50%! Anyway the main point of these is to find the ideas. Whether or not we pick the best move, let’s make sure we understand the possibilities.

Okay, onto the new four problems.

#5

A Strategic Puzzle

Taken from Volotikin’s Perfect Your Chess. This kind of position makes me so happy.

Black to move

Quick n Dirty: QGA Part 2

Warning: the following post is incomplete, I stopped thinking about the QGA and only made it halfway through. Still, I like the work I did and thought it better to do a partial post then none at all!

Some years ago every GM course or recommendation I came across against 1.d4 opened with “I am recommending [insert variation here] because it is the best combination of sound and unknown, except the QGA of course.” Hear this a few times and you start thinking you should be playing the QGA. At around the same time FM Nate Solon showed me a few games of his in the QGA where he was equalizing or better out of the opening, with regularity, against IMs in classical games. I thought, I could do that! And tried to repeat the lines he played. In the exact lines he showed I did fairly well, elsewhere where I had to try my own preparation, not so well. This emerged a few times we prepared together actually; in the QGD Janowski with …a6 we independently did some prep and then checked it together. His lines were more concise and to the point, focusing on the key ideas and standard development schemes, they far more useful to preparation than my scattered lines. It’s not that my lines were wrong, but they were far less useful than his narrower presentation. His understood and showed the ideas and goals clearly; mine were mostly what the computer said, with inconsistent and difficult to learn move orders.

This is all to say I briefly tried the QGA out. More recently two short & sweets came out on chessable on the QGA and then a course for white that mentioned the difficulty of finding lines against the QGA, so we’re back looking at the QGA. Specifically I’d like to put together a quick starter repertoire that’s consistent enough to be quickly employable, and then, if some of the lines aren’t so strong, they can be subbed out. White has four main tries vs the QGA after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4:

a) 3.Nc3 the normal looking and inaccurate reply
b) 3.e4 the ambitious move I always struggled against
c) 3.e3 the standard move that allows …e5
d) 3.Nf3 the standard move that denies …e5

For consistencies’ sake I’d like to start by giving a quick plan for 3…a6 against all moves other than 3.e4. This post, which I’m writing first but publishing second, explores variations, while the first post will hone down to the easiest lines to learn with the most comprehensible ideas. Read that post! That’s the one where I do proper opening prep, this is the one where I get down a lot of variations but haven’t figured them out yet, much like the difference in my prep from an FM’s.

Four Ways to Screw Up a Calculation

Quick thoughts and I don’t have an example, but something I’ve been musing on. How and why do people mess up their calculations? I mean when the calculation can lead to clear material gains or checkmate, a tactic or combination rather than when the calculation leads to complex positional comparisons. I’m not thinking about evaluating, I’m thinking about how we screw up calculating forcing tactical lines, so I’m not really considering missing a quiet move in the middle or at the end either, that’s a different topic. So how do we screw up calculating tactical forcing lines?

1. We miss the idea entirely. People often say if they knew there was a tactic they’d find it, but without knowing they weren’t looking for it. What’s the weakness there? It’s either not automatically checking forcing continuations or not having cues that’d make you think ah there’s probably something here. This is not the one I’m interested in today. It can also apply when solving tactical puzzles, sometimes we miss the possible move entirely. For instance I got focused on Qg6 threatening Qh7# in a combinative puzzle I was working on recently. I did not see Qxg7+ sacrificing the queen at all. If I’d considered I’d have seen it was mate shortly, but the move was invisible to me. A few puzzles earlier I’d solved a Qxh7+ sacrifice where all the pieces were lined up in a way that there were cues for me, it was a move to consider, and considering it led to the result. In the Qxg7+ example I didn’t have those cues and I glazed over it. So this is the first type of error; you didn’t consider the move at all.
2. You didn’t learn from what you calculated. I find this one very interesting. In many positions the first move you check isn’t correct. Does that make it time wasted? No! Often it tells us hey this would work if not for one thing and maybe a new candidate move emerges that augments that one thing. There was a problem recently (I really should go find the problems) where Rf4-g4 would be mate if not for exf4, but then gxf4 in response would open the g file for Rg1… if not for a Bc5 ready to take it. So we’ve learned from what we calculated. If we could distract the e pawn (we could not) or the c5 bishop (we could) then we could set up the Rf4 …exf4 gxf4 followed by Rg1# sequence. We may not have considered the first move at all at first, but by calculating we came across a logical need, and can now find a move that fits that need, which was not obvious to us initially.
3. Bad sequencing. This is strongly connected to point (2) and I initially had them as the same broader category. A simple example is you consider Qh5 preparing to capture on h7, but do not consider capturing on h7 followed by Qh5. There are more complex ones though! The reason this goes with (2) is often you find an idea in one line, and now have to insert it in another variation. A problem recently I considered many a sacrifice on h3, usually with my f5 bishop, they didn’t work. I considered …Be4 pinning g2 so I could blast through on h3, it didn’t work. The answer was to sacrifice a rook on h3, then play …Be4 and suddenly it all worked. But I didn’t find this until I considered all the different configurations of ways I could play appealing moves. I’d seen all the ideas, but for a while I couldn’t get them to work, because I had only tried sequences which had obvious logic to me. How do you find sequences that are not obvious to you? You try different sequences! You learn from your calculations! Thus you can solve and learn patterns you don’t know yet, next time you’ll see it faster.
4. Not calculating far enough. This is the big one, and finding quiet moves at distance in the midst of a tactical sequence is very hard. I like to say that the right amount to calculate is always one move further than however far you did calculate. I think this is funny, but it’s not all that helpful. Instead I think there are two tips here I have found useful. One is when considering a tactic or combination we should be trying to figure out why it doesn’t work. Clearly evidenced in Think Like a Supergrandmaster is that strong players spend much greater portions of their time refuting ideas. Specifically at the end of the sequence is there anything the opponent could do that changes the eval. Just to give an example say you have 1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3 dxc3 4.Bc4 d5 5.Bxd5 Nf6, now this is still the right thing to play but you might spot 6.Bxf7+ Kxf7 7.Qxd8 and feel delighted. But if you thought a second more at the end you might realize 7…Bb4+ regains the queen. That kind of thing, do a scan of the final position just to make sure it doesn’t crumble, check that one last move, if you’ve got the time. The other is a thought from Yusupov I’m paraphrasing: don’t stop calculating if there are still forcing moves to make. Another problem I failed recently I found the first 5 moves of a sequence, 10 if you could opposing replies, but the king was starting to run away. We had further checks, clear ones to do, but we definitely weren’t checkmating so I gave up on the line. Wrong! It turned out within the next 3 moves we could pick off the opposing queen. But I was focused solely on the king and stopped calculating. I still had forcing moves to make and should’ve looked further. Just because the king was starting to wriggle free didn’t mean I should end the calculation.

Exchanges

I was recently skimming two books I’d like to discuss here, Pump Up Your Rating by Axel Smith and My System by Aron Nimzowitsch. In Pump Up Your Rating he gives the following position, black has just played 12…Nb4. You may try to solve for white’s best move if you like.

White to move – Olafsson-Averbakh Interzonal 1958

Some Interesting Moves

Positions you could try solving, under each will be a clue of the move type being looked for, you can scroll to the hint or not. All are tactical ideas from bullet/blitz games I played recently. The first one is prettiest but admittedly up a piece to start with:

Calculate a direct win

Simple and great is 1.Bxh7+ Kxh7 2.Qh5+ Kg8 3.Nxf7 threatening mate on h8 3…Rxf7 4.Qxf7+ winning b7 as well. But I was quite proud of 1.Nxc6 Bxc6 2.d5 exd5 3.Bxh7+ with the classic double bishop sac 3…Kxh7 4.Qh5 Kg8 5.Bxg7 Kxg7 6.Qg4 Kh6 7.Rf5 1-0.

Problem Solving

A while ago a reader sent me a problem set they had worked on. I promised to look at it soon and give feedback and… then failed to do so. My bad! Apologies! Let’s look at some problems from it now.

As the intro points out, readers tend not to finish books. In fact, we tend to barely read even small portions of them! I love looking at chess books, I suspect I do more exploration than most, and yet still I am indeed guilty as charged. One thing that makes me bounce off books quickly is study like positions, usually mate in very few moves targeting a king on an open board where only the least intuitive queen move leads to the mate. Sadly for me, this file opens with such problems. So for now, let’s skip them. I may be deeply wrong but my experience is they’re exhausting, unrewarding, and unrelated to most chess play. So skipping those, I’m going to discuss the next few positions and stream of consciousness my ideas in them.

Our first position

Journey to 2696 (actually 2701, actually actually 2735)

I have hit a new all time bullet peak. Many think bullet is not remotely representative of broader chess skills, all mouse speed. I don’t think this is true, in part because I play on a touch screen. I have found when my bullet goes up that other forms of chess reliably corroborate the improvement. Let us assume it’s meaningful. This post will break down the chess work I’ve done over the past three months to get there and try to observe how impactful different study was. This will likely be very boring if you’re not me! But I do think there’s some studying ideas in here worth considering.