Play Like Botvinnik – attacking on the entire board

In both games below, Botvinnik already has a dominating position, but has to find new areas of the board where he can put pressure on the opponent.

Botvinnik – Lilienthal, 1936
White to move. View the entire game here

The game is fully covered in this video:

Botvinnik – Zagoriansky, 1943
White to move. View the entire game here

I also made a YouTube video about the second game:

Attacking with An Isolated Pawn – Botvinnik’s trademark

Botvinnik – Batuev, 1931

 White to move

Mikhail Botvinnik was well known for his handling of positions with Isolated Queen’s Pawn. Here as well, he slowly built up the pressure and opponent faltered. Black had just played 17 …Ra8-c8?, exposing himself to an unexpected sacrifice. Botvinnik fully took advantage of his pieces being very active. Replay through the game here.

Mikhail Botvinnik in 1933

Play Like World Champion - Botvinnik vs. Alatortsev

Botvinnik – Alatortsev, 1934

 White to move

White delayed castling, and is putting pressure on h7. Botvinnik begins an attack with a manoeuvre that was novel at the time, but today became a standard practice, in this and in many other openings. See the complete game here.

Blink – the Power of Intuition in Chess

Reading the book “Blink”, I could not help thinking about how it relates to chess. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell discusses how certain decisions can be correctly made with only minimal amount of thinking. It also gives examples where extra time taken to make a decision lead to worse results. The author also suggests the following:

In complex situations, quick intuitive decisions are often more likely to be correct than those based on a lot of complex analysis.

In simple situations, logical analysis actually proved useful and led to good results.

The book actually does not use the word “intuition” enough, but decisions made at the blink of an eye - obviously represent a person’s intuition. The above rules work in chess as well. Very often chess annotators point out that a chess player did not play a move that he would have easily played in a blitz game, instead went with a more complicated idea, which unsurprisingly turned out to be wrong. Another common observation is that “A long think usually leads to a bad move”.

To me - this just goes to prove that improving one’s intuition is very useful for blitz games, but will also make you an overall stronger player, save you time on the clock and add to your confidence as a chess player. For further discussion on the role of intuition of chess – read Dvoretsky’s book Attack and Defence In Chess.

Anatoly Karpov turns 60

It is hard to believe that Anatoly Karpov is turning 60 on May 23. There is a lot chess players today can learn from this great player, both in terms of positional ideas, and in terms of fighting spirit at the chessboard. His early games had a significant impact on my opening repertoire, and I made several videos with the goal of learning typical ideas that Karpov demonstrated in the 1970s and 1980s.

Photo by Frank Hoppe

Here are videos from my youtube channel with 5 games played by Karpov. He won with White in all of these games and the videos illustrate why he was very successful with 1.e4 and show how he was able to play in the same active positional style against just about any opening.

Defeating the Pirc defense. This game made me realize how important it is to predict opponent’s plans.

  Beating the Najdorf

Beating the Najdorf – yet again!

Handling the Sveshnikov variation in the same style – by exploiting the ‘d5’ square

 Defeating the Open Spanish – illustrates the importance of initiative in the endgame. This line became a critical test of Black ideas in this variation.

ChessBase turning 25

In his annotations to the game against Smyslov from the 1958 match, Botvinnik noted that a younger grandmaster ignored a transposition to the Botvinnik-Smyslov game, and as a result – made a faulty comment on some game played in the 1970s. Botvinnik’s conclusion was: “young grandmasters don’t study games of older generation, but it is also clear that chess openings should be stored using computer software”. Yes, this is so true, and Garry Kasparov was one of the first chess players who picked up on this idea, and therefore got involved in the development and promotion of what now became ChessBase software. Here is the story: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7229. Time flies and ChessBase software is now the most popular one among chess players, and it has affected the development of the game quite profoundly.

The photo from the article comes with the caption “It was Kasparov who first recognized the power of the system and used it intensely”. Good point, but it feels like it was Kasparov’s teacher who was first to recognize the need for such software!

Years have passed, and Kasparov now is also inside the software!

Watching the Candidates Matches

As I am watching the World Championship Candidates matches, I am surprised to see that Vladimir Kramnik is out, despite his absolutely amazing opening preparation. In several games against Radjabov and Grischuk he seemed to have barely made any moves of his own and yet he had a very hard time against Teimur, and even a harder time against Grischuk. I suppose that proves that chess a sport still lives! Knowing most openings “down to checkmate” does not guarantee success, even when accompanied by such a skill of middlegame and endgame that Kramnik has. It does however make the games a bit harder to follow as it is very hard to tell where the game actually begins.

Alexander Grischuk is through to the finals!