Game of the Week XL-Mastrovasilis,Athanasios (2523) - Nikolov,Momchil (2522)

“Pattern Recognition” has become a common term in chess language, and everyone wants to find an easier way to master it.

The best way to accomplish this that I can suggest would be to start by reviewing/playing well-known simple tactical motives and build on that; essentially: solve puzzles non-stop.

It’s like learning math: the foundation for mastering more complex branches of math is set by first learning simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division methods and using them whenever possible at school. I remember the satisfaction, for example, when I recognized the path to sin²+cos²=1 from a difficult problem in a calculus class because of pattern recognition that I had developed. 

Combinations in chess are almost always based on simple patterns. The beauty of the combination and the artistic part of the game is observed when a complex of these patterns emerge in unknown territory and gives immense satisfaction to chess enthusiasts. I felt this phenomenon in this week’s Game of the Week.

Game of the Week is- Mastrovasilis vs. Nikolov

This week's Game of the Week was submitted by Jimonios- thank you!