Taken from Volotikin’s Perfect Your Chess. This kind of position makes me so happy.
Black to move
Black wants to trade dark squared bishops when white loses their two bishops, will be left with a bad bishop, and black’s knight can set up shop on d4. Ergo we have the delightful maneuver 1…Bb2! 2.Rc2 Ba3! 3.Rcd2 Bc5
Strategic excellence
Great example of what trades are desirable. A very elegant touch was 4.h3 Qb6! trying to induce 5.Bxc5? when 5…dxc5 secures the d4 square. But a further elegant touch would follow! Black should play …Rad8 before invading on d4. The more rooks we trade off the more we’ll highlight the resulting advantage of the d4 knight to the enemy light square bishop. This is something that doesn’t come naturally to me but I’ve been working on; when the opponent is stuck with a very bad piece then trading other pieces can exploit that weakness.
The first opening book I ever studied much was called Accelerated Dragons by John Donaldson. It was published in 1998 so the theory doesn’t hold up but it was a rather thoughtful book and one of my favorites throwing out many a creative idea. As I recall the opening chapter talks about favorable endgames for black, highlighting ones where black plays …e5 and …Nd4 and trades off all the other pieces besides white’s poor light square bishop. So I found the …Bb2-a3-c5 sequence above knowing this to be a good trade, though I didn’t see the idea of trying to get white to play Bxc5 allowing …dxc5 and was more focused on how to make …e5 work which doesn’t really, d6 is too weak. For the record, a funny idea vs the Maroczy I’ve never seen anyone but me play, came from this book and won me the game I made master 20 years after its publication.
Random aside: I read The Anand Files. It was a fun look at recent history. I mostly ignored the chess. That’s not to say there wasn’t lots of interesting chess but I’m trying to separate books I read for improvement and books I read for culture/history/enjoyment. I loved On The Origins of Good Moves, but found myself frustrated by the puzzles, because I wanted to get to more of the history! I suspect the puzzles were good and there was useful improvement material but the combination didn’t work for me. Here there were no puzzles so it was easy to glance at positions but ignore all the variations and here about how the team was working and what was going on. Anyway, fun book, and delving into a subject – team preparations around a WC – that it’s hard to find much insight into. I’d like to read more chess history but I have to keep it separate from what I’m working on to improve. They’re different goals. The only way I can think to mix them well would be to reopen my game memorization project.
raskerino chess 