Fire in the Mailbox
I receive a lot of messages from fellow chess.com members. Sometimes I am frightened when I open my mailbox since I know very well that I won't be able to reply to many of them. There are requests like "I am an attacking player, what opening should I play as White and what openings should I play as Black against 1.e4 and 1.d4." make me wonder: did the sender expect some superficial advice like " Play King's Gambit for White, and Najdorf Sicilian for Black against 1.e4 and the King's Indian defense against 1.d4"? Or were they asking me to devise a complete opening repertoire, something that takes tons of time? As a rule I answer questions like this by referring to my series "Openings for Tactical Players". You can find them on chess.com and pick the opening that appeals to you the most.
But sometimes I get questions that are impossible to answer, unless I invest a lot of time. When I get a game and a request to review it then what should I do? My advice is to send requests like this to Mr. Silman. In his weekly column he deals exactly with this kind of questions and I am sure you'll enjoy his instructional and witty writing.
Fortunately, recently I got two messages that I enjoyed a lot. Both of them were regarding my hit parade in this article: http://www.chess.com/article/view/positional-rxe6-sacrifice-part-two
One of them was from IM David Pruess (dpruess on chess.com). He mentioned a game with a Rxe6 sacrifice that I had never seen. You must see this gem to understand the mix of the feelings I had after playing through the game:
From one side I was ashamed, because how could I not know such a beautiful game, especially one where the great Anatoly Karpov was completely annihilated? Being a nice person, David tried to comfort me that it was just a blitz game and that no one knows all the games. True, and yet to miss such a beauty was almost a crime on my part. Fortunately the joy of playing through the game far outweighed anything else. Of course if I knew this game my hit parade would have been different and Mikhail "The Magician" Tal would easily be the winner.
The second message that I enjoyed came from FM Kostya Kavutskiy (hellokostya). He sent me a game that I knew very well, but somehow just forgot to include into my article. Here I offer the game as three exercises for you to compare your attacking skills to Tal's main apprentice - GM Shirov.
It looks like White completely dominates in the center, doesn't he?
