Chess for Beginners

If you live in the South Florida area, the Miami International Chess Academy is offering group lessons with IM Blas Lugo at reasonable rates . Check out their website for more info.

The following game illustrates (starting in move 49.) how to exploit an extra pawn in a King and pawn endgame with many pawns left on the board. This example comes from James Howell’s excellent book ‘Essential Chess Endings’.

Things to remember:

1. Activate the king.

2. Create a passed pawn to tie down your opponent’s king.

3. Cut out any of your opponent’s counterplay.

4. Once your opponent has run out ouf pawn moves it should be easy to force his king back.

5. Either penetrate with your king and pick off your opponent’s pawns while they are busy dealing with your passed pawn or advance your king and passed pawn to paralyze your opponent’s king and force him to make concessions with his remaining pawns.

Chessok, has made available online an opening tree search. You can now receive detailed statistics on all opening moves carefully classified and stored in their opening database.

My game has suffered recently, but I am more determined than ever to improve…so the following quote should help me on my way: 

Settle on your objective is the rule. Such an objective may be a pawn or a point. Which one, it matters not. But aimlessly drifting from one to another, this will expose you  to a strategical disgrace.

Aaron Nimzowitsch

Photo report of the Miami Chess Open held from September 28th through September 30th.

Photography: William Mendez © 2007
Hikaru Nakamura wins the 2007 Miami
Chess Open

Photography: William Mendez © 2007
U.S Champion Alexander Shabalov

Photography: William Mendez © 2007
IM David Pruess contemplates the position

Fritz: Tactical, but positionally sound. Well rounded.

Hiarcs: Positional and human-like play. Good in unbalanced positions.

Junior: Very tactical, sacrificial style play.

Rybka: Strongest chess engine. Excellent positional understanding and human-like play. Excellent evaluation of dynamic positions. Great for analysis.

Shredder: Very positional and solid. Excellent endgame play.

Zappa: Human-like play, aggressive. Very strong, catching up to Rybka.

Fruit: Well balanced positional play.

The following endgame example illustrates how to turn a one pawn advantage into a win:

The conversion of an extra pawn falls into three phases: 1) the King is activated. 1.Kf1

1…Ke7 2.Ke2 Kd6 3.Kd3 Kd5 2)Mobilization of the majority. 4.b4

Mobilize by moving the “candidate”, which is the unopposed pawn.4…Kc6 5.Kc4 h5 6.a4 h4 7.b5+ Kb6 8.Kb4 g5 9.a5+

9…Kb7 10.Kc5 Kc7 11.b6+ axb6+ 12.axb6+ Kb7

3) The King goes to the Kingside to gobble up the Black pawns (transformation of one advantage to another):13.Kd6 Kxb6 14.Ke7 f5 15.Kf6+-  .

In a previous post I had promised to compile and post the most instructive games in ChessBase format. I haven’t been able to get around to compiling all of the games, so I am posting a PDF file containing a list of these Educational Chess Games based broken down by themes.

Today is the first entry of my online training notebook, I’m still trying to figure out how I will work this out, but I plan on adding an entry with the salient topics that I covered as well as personal progress and benchmark data.

I also plan on adding a downloadable ChessBase file which will contain additional positions, games and notes.

Study Endgames
Reviewed pages 57-88 in Silman’s Endgame Course. This chapter dealt with distant opposition as well as basic K+P vs. K endings.

Below are a few keypoints from the chapter:

Opposition without a direct connection

In the diagram below notice that the corners of the rectangle have the same colored squares, in this case White has the opposition, since he is 5 (odd number) of squares away from the Black King. You can determine the opposition of two King’s without a direct connection by creating an imaginary rectangle with intersecting same colored squares.

Questions to ask in a K+P vs. K endgame:

• Is the pawn a rook pawn? (then more than likely the game will be drawn)
• Is the stronger side’s King one square or two squares in front of it’s pawn? (One square and it depends on who has the opposition, two squares is a win for the stronger side.)
• Who possess the opposition?

Endgame Puzzle

White to move. Is White lost?

Study Tactics

Did questions from the 3rd stage of studies (Queen Checkmates) #419 -442 (23) for 30 minutes with an 84% success rate.

This is a simple puzzle, but I notice that tactics that involve pinned pawns give me difficulty. Highlight for answer [1.Qh6+ Bh7 2.Qxg7#]

The best thing I can do for my chess is to improve my thinking process, which is one of my greatest weaknesses. Below are some of the reasons why it my thinking process just plain stinks.

1. Not considering the consequences of a move at least 3 ply deep on every play.
2. Focusing too much on my plan, and not worrying about my opponent’s plan.
3. Not following a standard though process method.
4. Not considering the most aggressive candidate moves.
5. Poor candidate move selection. This includes.
   1. not considering aggressive moves
   2. retained image errors.
   3. Worrying about misconceived threats, or not choosing candidates because of worries about King safety.
6. Not looking for tactics during my opponent’s move.
7. Not looking at the whole board. This leads to underutilized pieces at best and a surprise checkmate at worse.
8. Poor evaluation of the position.
9. Playing without a plan.
10. Playing too much blitz. Not that blitz games are bad, but they do not allow you to apply a though process and it does not allow you to practice your analysis and evaluation skills. All improving players should stay away from blitz until we have developed a consistent and applicable thought process via games played at long time controls.

That’s it for now, I’ll add more in time. Feel free to leave comments on how you can improve your thought process.