The Best Games of a Chess Coach: Winning against Kasparov!

It was July 2007 and I was playing casually some chess at Playchess.com, when, unexpectedly, my game formula matched me to play a game with the handle called Raffael, which was currently the top blitz player in the honorary list. Well-known by all, the mysterious Raffael was actually Gary Kasparov and understandably the whole chat room was full of interested players who often watch his games in search of a good advice or spectacular position. That day, though, they had to get disappointed by their favorite “Raffael” and see him losing dramatically after an opening he was completely dominating. We played a blitz game with a moderately set time control of 4min+1sec, so both of us had to be quite fast and twice more careful. As I said, the opening in this game of mine was not something I would be willing to brag about, as the strongest ever chess player outplayed me indisputably by playing one of his cunning schemes. Yet, in the middlegame I somehow managed to create a surprisingly strong counterplay after I deliberately focused on the weakness in his position. Here I want to mention that every position in chess has its obvious or often not so obvious weaknesses even when it is set up by the strongest chess player in the world, guess this is Garry Kasparov, right? So that was a key point that I managed to realize in the right moment, so my focused plan succeeded bringing a spectacular loss to the Grandmaster in front of his zealous fans. My plan happened to be feasible and subsequently successful due to several key factors and one of them was that I managed to reorganize my pieces, so that they aim at my opponent’s weaknesses in position, while he was both thinking of how to defend them and how to carry on with his own attack. As a result of my successful execution of my first idea – to point out all of Kasparov’s position’s weakness and make him bother about them, after one dubious move of his in the middlegame, I got a magnificent powerful counterplay and expectedly shattered his position without asking for permission.

This game of mine against the strongest player both players and non-players know can only show you that there is no one who is invincible and everyone’s position has a number of weaknesses. This is chess! You just need to keep your weaknesses inconspicuous for your knowledgeable opponents at this high level, while still fighting for your own plan to succeed. I won this game and though it was on the internet, it was real for me and I am proud to share it with all of you who love chess so much.