Uh... Jaya Ballard, whatcha doin' here? Whatever.

Style (Like playing style)

m-o-s-p-e

Updated: Aug 19, 2019, 3:19 PM | 5

Hi everyone, I'm back. Sunday just passed and another Sunday calls for another blog post.

Here I'll talk about playing styles, especially offense vs. defense. I am personally an aggressive player and my brother, @Cool_Pika_Han knows that, where he is a defensive player.

It's really hard to tell which strategy is better; for example, Garry Kasparov was aggressive and Anatoly Karpov was defensive though none were strongly better than the other.

Below I will be taking positions from Kasparov vs. Karpov games and turning them into puzzles, and I will analyze another two cool games at the end. Here I go:

The following position is from a game between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov during a world championship. Karpov was white and Kasparov was black. In the real game, Kasparov play d5, but that cost him the game. What should he actually have done?

Unfortunately, it seems Kasparov was too aggressive there by pushing his pawn. That doesn't mean that offense is bad though, you just have to find the right opening and timing.

In the next game, Kasparov as white beat Karpov this time during a championship rematch. During the actual game, Karpov played Kh8, but what should he have done?

Sure, it would be a bad idea for Karpov to counter-attack in this position (I mean, it might work), but at the same time, he was probably being a bit too defensive.

Looks like both offense and defense have pros and cons. However, not many people think about playing styles other than those two, so here's an interesting game coming up. (It's not going to be a puzzle...)

This next game is between Magnus Carlsen and Garry Kasparov in the year 2004, and the game was a tie (offer + accept draw) even though Magnus Carlsen was pretty young. What's really cool about the following game is that while Garry Kasparov does his usual aggressive style, Carlsen is almost playing offense and defense at the same time. I guess he just has a flexible playing style. Anyway, here's the game:

I thought this game was pretty cool, especially because it was between the two greatest chess players of all time. Even thought Carlsen was up a pawn for a decent amount of time, the game was pretty even the whole time, mostly due to all the constant tension. As I said, the players use very interesting playing styles in this game. (Both offense and defense simultaneously of neither)

OK, final game here. The following game is Stockfish playing itself, so... yeah.

OK, so that's the game Stockfish played against itself. Honestly, I kinda liked black in this game 'cause it was a bit more... aggressive I guess. Oh, and I forgot to mention this earlier, but um... I kinda like tension in my games. Thus if I were black, I wouldn't let white do 3-fold repetition. Anyway, I guess stockfish doesn't have much of a playing style though... they just play the best move after looking millions of moves ahead.

Yeah.

Anyway, I don't believe there are playing styles that are more successful that others, because all of 'em are good if you're good at that playing style I guess. If you don't agree with me, you can say so in the comment section below.

And FYI, I'm not just aggressive in chess, but in a lot of games. In Magic the Gathering, I like red and green because they're the most aggressive. In my favorite video game Guild Wars 2, I like the classes and weapons that do the most damage. So yeah, that's me.

I guess that's all!

Um... the first day of school is soon, um... and my birthday is soon, and um... they're actually on the same day. Just saying.

I don't know if any of you started school yet, but if you did, I hope you're having fun!

Thank you for reading this blog post and I'll hopefully be back next Sunday.

Style (Like playing style)

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