A New Way To Beat The Ruy Lopez
In this article, I am going to try something new, and I would like the readers at chess.com to let me know if they like it. I wrote an article a while back called "Learning By Induction"
( http://www.chess.com/article/view/learning-by-induction ). In that article, I proposed that one could learn a skill better by WATCHING an expert do it rather than having an expert TELL YOU HOW to do it.
So I would like to try a little experiment. in this article, I will present 7 games (without any notes) all starting with Black using the same line against the Ruy Lopez. I am guessing that few of you have had any experience with this line, so it will make a good topic for the test. (You may recognise one game that I published in a previous article dealing with the attacking scheme used. I removed the notes for the purposes of this article). The test will be this:
1) Play through all seven games.
2) Try to determine the 3 main ideas for Black in this opening. They can be expressed along the lines of:
Black is trying to attack X
Black is trying to control square X
Black is trying to make White do (or prevent White from doing) X
Black is trying to do a certain thing with a certain piece or pieces
Black is trying to do things on X side of the board
3) Make notes as you play through each game and see if that idea or theme appears in any of the other games. That would be a good indicator that an idea is important (or important to avoid).
4) Write a comment listing your top three ideas for this opening. Write as though you were telling another person "Here are 3 things you need to do, prevent, avoid, or look for when playing this opening."
5) Let me know if you found this exercise to be useful. Maybe I will do it again or not, depending on how it is received.
6) After a day or so (when enough comments are received), I will post a comment stating what I think the top 3 ideas are in this opening, so keep checking back to see if I have posted my "answers" yet. Perhaps you will come up with better ideas than I will (maybe I will cheat off of you!). Anyway, it should be interesting, entertaining, or educational. Maybe all three!
