Chess thread

[Tal]

Mikhail Botvinnik was World Champion for a long time, although, like Muhammed Ali, he lost and regained his crown a few times in between.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Botvinnik

Here are some of his brilliancies (double and treble spring onions, if you please...):

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7496

(Solutions are played out on the linked page at the bottom)

He is the man who lost his title to Tal in 1960 only to win it back the following year. He was the darling of the Soviets; a highly regarded Comrade.

He was World Champ from 1948-57, 58-60 and 61-63.



Whereas Petrosian and Rubenstein were predominantly positional players and Tal and Spassky predominantly tactical players, Botvinnik was right in the middle. He looked to give both sides a chance and created unclear positions, expecting to outplay his uncomfortable opponent.

Perhaps his greatest achievement was coaching a young Karpov, then a young Kasparov and then a young Kramnik, each of whom would become World Champion.

[Tal]

Merry Christmas to all Chess Threadites (working title)

May all your speculative attacks come off, your wriggling defenses squirm you out of trouble and your blunders be missed by your opponent.

[The Baron]

Cant wait for 2013 the candidates tourney and the WC match.

[Tal]

Absolutely, Baron. Whatever it brings!

[Tal]

I'm going to try something I haven't done in a while: something really technical. Bear with me.

King and pawn endgames look simple but there would not be books on them if that were true.

Take an empty board and put the villain King somehere in the middle. Then take your King and put him two squares back. If it is your move, you can't go forwards so it is back and concede ground or sideways and let the villain come in diagonally and attack whichever side you have left unattended.

So, you want to get into this two-squares-apart position when it is the other guy's move next and you can get an advantage. This is called getting the OPPOSITION.

As you progress, you turn the enemy king around and this can often lead to winning material.

The first example in the link below is a really nice example of the opposition:

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8733.

Start at move 86 and play through the position. The notes should help, too.

[TightEnd]

I had rook and king v king recently after 55 moves or so

The b%£R%£ offered me a draw

Took me another 45 moves to corner the bugger and mate him

A small step for the Tal's of this world, but a big one for me

My rating (not sure its ELO, but on the site I play) is up 200 points in two months...

[Tal]

I had rook and king v king recently after 55 moves or so

The b%£R%£ offered me a draw

Took me another 45 moves to corner the bugger and mate him

A small step for the Tal's of this world, but a big one for me

My rating (not sure its ELO, but on the site I play) is up 200 points in two months...

Superb!

This is relevant to my post above!

The way to mate with king and rook v king is firstly to set up an electric fence with the rook (if the enemy king is on e5, put your rook on a4 and he can't get past the fifth rank.

Then, get your king on the other side of the fence a knight's move away. Eventually, the enemy king will give you the opposition (ie 2 squares away).

Then you check him by moving the rook/fence one rank back. King has to move backwards.

Move your king up to a Knight's move away and keep going.

If you need to waste a move for any reason, move your rook along the fence either one square or the whole width of the board (whichever is further from the enemy king).

Eventually, you get the enemy king on the back rank and when you move the fence back the final time, it is to electrocute his majesty...

[EvilPie]

I'm going to try something I haven't done in a while: something really technical. Bear with me.

King and pawn endgames look simple but there would not be books on them if that were true.

Take an empty board and put the villain King somehere in the middle. Then take your King and put him two squares back. If it is your move, you can't go forwards so it is back and concede ground or sideways and let the villain come in diagonally and attack whichever side you have left unattended.

So, you want to get into this two-squares-apart position when it is the other guy's move next and you can get an advantage. This is called getting the OPPOSITION.

As you progress, you turn the enemy king around and this can often lead to winning material.

The first example in the link below is a really nice example of the opposition:

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8733.

Start at move 86 and play through the position. The notes should help, too.

Sigh.

Just clicked the forward arrow 86 times before realising you can just click the numbers.

[TightEnd]

Exactly

I drove him back one rank at a time with the rook well away from the action but fencing him in, manoeuvring him into a quarter of the board, then an eighth of the board...

Needs precision though, the stalemate opportunities were present near the end

[Tal]

Exactly

I drove him back one rank at a time with the rook well away from the action but fencing him in, manoeuvring him into a quarter of the board, then an eighth of the board...

Needs precision though, the stalemate opportunities were present near the end

Just keep the rook miles out of the way and the king a knight move away along the fence and it is as easy as pie. No stalemates from there as long as you keep the rook out of touching distance.

[Tal]

I'm going to try something I haven't done in a while: something really technical. Bear with me.

King and pawn endgames look simple but there would not be books on them if that were true.

Take an empty board and put the villain King somehere in the middle. Then take your King and put him two squares back. If it is your move, you can't go forwards so it is back and concede ground or sideways and let the villain come in diagonally and attack whichever side you have left unattended.

So, you want to get into this two-squares-apart position when it is the other guy's move next and you can get an advantage. This is called getting the OPPOSITION.

As you progress, you turn the enemy king around and this can often lead to winning material.

The first example in the link below is a really nice example of the opposition:

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8733.

Start at move 86 and play through the position. The notes should help, too.

Sigh.

Just clicked the forward arrow 86 times before realising you can just click the numbers.

 

[Tal]

I’ve had a bit of time today to answer a question RedDog posed me a couple of weeks ago (sorry for the delay, sir). This will be honeybadgeresque, albeit with less elegance and much less intellectual content.

The subject is luck in chess. There is more than you might immediately think. As with any tournament, you can be lucky because an opponent is late or a queer result happens on another board that directly affects your chances of winning the tournament, or someone’s ‘phone goes off and you win by default, or your opponent runs out of time when he was just about to checkmate you. For every one of these, rightly or wrongly, you would describe yourself as having been “lucky”.

But what about an individual game?

The first thing is where playing styles fit. Imagine a graph with an x- and y-axis. A dot on the x-axis but all the way along is someone who is very tactical and looks for sharp combinations, sacrifices everything he can and prefers a sledgehammer to a precision instrument every day of the week. A dot on the y-axis but all the way up is a positional player, who understands the power of the pieces in a more long-term sense, as they look to create holes in the opponent’s position, swap off their bad bishop for the villain’s good one and create little edges that add up when the endgame comes.

Say I’m a really aggressive, tactical player. If I play someone whose strength is tactics, but they aren’t quite as good as me, I’ll do very well against them over a long period, perhaps (to be crude) because I can see one move further than they. If the villain is instead as strong in positional sense, their rating might not be as high as mine, but I will leave weaknesses in my position which they will naturally exploit and it could be much more likely that they will get a result against me. The luck is both in us being drawn to play each other (say we were the second best players in our respective teams or say we had the same number of points in a tournament and were drawn against each other) and in the match/mismatch of our playing styles. To get better as a player, you need to have ability in both, but even the greats aren’t (100,100); everybody is more one than the other.

[Tal]

You also have opening theory. Say you learn the first ten moves of an opening and, in doing so, you know a couple of little traps the opposition can fall into, if they play what looks objectively to be a perfectly reasonable move. Your opponent might be twice as good as you, but they happen on this one occasion not to know about this trap, fall into it and you get a win that next to no one else of your level would have been able to achieve.

Then comes the game itself. I’m going to thrown in some numbers just to make it easier to explain; it isn’t intended to be accurate. Imagine in ten years’ time that someone has built a computer that has “solved” chess; it has the perfect answer against every move and is both completely unbeatable and completely unexploitable. The top human player might well be able to play the best move on the board 95% of the time, but there is still a 5% edge to the computer, which is, in practice, two moves in a 40 move game. These moves might not be blunders, but they will be sub-optimal and might be enough. Move down the rankings to a standard Grandmaster and he will find the right move 85% of the time and again the 10% he gives to the world number 1 might not be enough for him to lose the game, as the move might just be second-best and fine. Sometimes, the 5% of the world number 1 will be enough for the GM to win and that can of course happen. He will be lucky to be the player who is sitting opposite the world number 1 when it happens to be the one time in a however many that the mistake is made AND that it is sufficiently serious to lead to defeat AND that the GM makes moves of high enough quality to seal the deal. If they play 10 times, for the sake of argument, 6 are wins by the world number 1, 3 are draws and 1 is a win for the underdog.

Move down the rankings again to my level (it’s a long way down, but bear with me!). I might make the perfect move (let’s be generous) 50% of the time and, of the other 50%, the majority are still reasonable moves. If I play an opponent of equal strength, all results are possible. They must be. Crudely, every other touch of a piece on the board is a sub-optimal move! The luck is again where these “mistakes” fall and more importantly whether they can – and are – capitalised on. It’s all well and good my opponent making a mistake. I have to play the right move back or the moment might have passed. We’ve all seen the “white to play and mate in 2 moves” problems. They are a lot easier when you know that there is a checkmate there. Over the board, you don’t know that.

[Tal]

In 1999, I played in the British Under 15 Championships. I had been doing well and was paired to play someone who I knew well and that I had been on a higher board than for Warwickshire juniors for some time. She was a decent player but rated slightly below me. Although it wasn’t a knock-out, the winner of this game would be British Champion and would be invited to join the official England Squad for the next three years (which neither of us had been in before, although we had both played a couple of games when we were 11 – junior squad is Under 12 - Under 18) and play in the team travelling to, if memory serves, Estonia. I reached a position after a couple of hours that was favourable and I had a decision to make as to whether I went full throttle for the king or prepared the attack for one more move. I spent an age deciding and couldn’t make my mind up: was the attack premature and setting it up best? Or was another move just wasting time and allowing my opponent time to regroup? I took a deep breath and went for the attack. I lost. It took a long time to recover from that day and it was without doubt my worst experience over the board. Tears were shed. The other move won the game, the British Under 15 Championship and a place in the England Team, which I had been trying to achieve for four years. Second equal looks good on a CV, but every time I say or send it, I am reminded that I could have won.

Where was the luck in that? I effectively flipped a coin in my head to choose the move, as I couldn’t decide which was right. It was a 50/50 shot, I called Tails and have regretted it ever since. I’m not melodramatic enough to say it has haunted me, because that would be silly. But we all have these situations in life – situations which have very little consequence to our lives objectively – which we remember and recall vividly. My opponent was lucky to win in that sense of the word, although she of course deserved to win and I was the first to say that. But she effectively had no control of her destiny while I was contemplating that move. I decided whether I or she became British Champion. This was Steve Davis missing that cut on the black in 1985, while Dennis Taylor sat in his chair only almost nothing like it.

In poker, I suppose this is analogous to winning flips. Over the course of our lifetime, we’ll win 50% of them (even cambridgealex, deadman and rastafish...eventually), but it is WHEN we win them that can make all the difference. If you win your flip in the first level against a micro-stack in a bowl comp, it barely matters. If you win it heads-up in the November Nine, it might be quite nice. Maths doesn’t care what the situation is; it just sorts out the Ws and Ls into equal piles over time. I can’t even imagine how many flips Jerry Yang, Darvin Moon or Jamie Gold had to win over 8 days of solid poker. Fast forward a few years and, like all poker players, no matter how much we all mock those who say it...those six words are uttered to anyone who’ll listen...

Why can’t I win a race?!

[Tal]

If long things aren't your cup of char, here's a visual aid for our rook and king mate:



See how the rook has set up the electric fence along the 7th rank? Thou shall not pass.

If it's White to move, slide the king one square to the right and he is a knight's move away, on the other side of the fence. Then, if the king goes into the corner, we follow him again and he has to come back. Then we deliver checkmate by moving the fence to the 8th. BUZZZZZZ!

If it is Black to move, he might move to our left. That being the case, as he's a knight's move from us, we need to waste a move, so move the rook one square along the 7th and Black has either to move opposite our king (and we checkmate) or the other way and we follow as explained above.

One point re Tighty's post: if a game continues for a spell of 50 moves where nothing is taken, the game is drawn. 45 is a sweat!!