Safe nerves "by FIDE Master Palomo Franklin
The storms that we feel during an important chess match often leave us at a crossroads in which we feel that our emotions could influence a game in a negative or positive way, the usual dilemma is, how to know if in a certain opportunity the influence will be positive.
I remembered during the meeting that I bring my readers an anecdote that I share:
"According to Mihail Tal (1960 World Champion), during the fourth round of the 1964 USSR championship, he was playing against Grandmaster Vasiukov and a complex position occurred in which there was an interesting piece sacrifice.
Tal began to calculate the variants, with the speed that characterized him, but the sacrifice was very complex even for the enormous analytical capacity of the "Magician of Riga" and, to make matters worse, a famous poem by the Soviet author Korney came to mind. Chukovski entitled "Oh, how difficult the job of pulling a hippopotamus out of the swamp must be" and, as often happens when something comes to mind, there is no way to concentrate, Tal, unconsciously stopped analyzing the position that was in the board and began to think about how to remove the poor animal.
He thought about how many people would be needed, the characteristics of the terrain, what means could be helped (ladders, winches, pulleys and even helicopters) but he could not find a way to rescue the hippopotamus.
Desperate for not finding the solution, he left it as impossible and thought "Well, let him drown!" and suddenly his mind was released and he realized that the piece sacrifice was not that complex and he handed over the knight and brilliantly won the game. "
The following day in the press it was written: "Mikhail Tal, after analyzing the position for more than 50 minutes, rightly sacrificed a piece"
Many times we imagine things that have nothing to do with our position, we remember everyday aspects of our life, which makes us waste a lot of time on things that have nothing to do with our departure, although unconsciously we could help ourselves with these thoughts to find a solution.
To describe this, I bring you a game that I played in 2020 when I managed to win the top-flight tournament in my country Venezuela and choose to be the Olympic team.
Friends, let's turn the pressure of the moment into concentration so that we can apply our ideas in a fluid way.
