Another Way to Study Games and Positions - Schiffers-Chigorin Saint Petersburg 1897
Hi there!
Here I am, with a more organic post, Today was an important day for my chess progress. I reached the milestone of 1000 ELO in rapid. But this is not what I want to talk about.
A friend of mine suggested me a book that could have helped me, "The Art of Checkmate" by Georges Renaud and Victor Kahn. The idea should be finding ways to give mate, because it is often easy to give mate when the position is set, it's all the job that drives to that position that can be hard!
I am notoriously very bad at reading books with diagrams, and chess books very often have diagrams by definition. What did I do then?
I did not buy the book yet, but I downloaded the free sample on kindle and checked the second diagram (the first one was easier to follow without a board). When I set the board to follow the moves suggested in a diagram I almost always get lost, copy the moves without understanding what I am doing. And then, the idea. Since in many cases books have positions from master games, why not looking for the master game?
I actually have an app, called Chessify, where I can scan a position and then look for videos where there is the given position. A good way to study a game or at least that very position, thing that I am usually bad at. A kind of passive way maybe, but then I can read the book and understand what it is talking about, and follow what is happening.
The specific example for today:
Game ending 2 from the book
Schiffer Chigorin 1897 played in Saint Petersburg (in my notes I wrote Piter, I like the Russian way to call it!)
The first video has several variations and mistakes pointed out
Then there is a longer video with ginger GM Simon Williams
He is also advertising one of his courses, yet I think the examples given in the video are very good.
- Minute 2 Knight vs rook endgame
- Minute 18 both bishop and rook
- Minute 23 rook pawn ending
- Minute 30 clearance
- Minute 34 clearance (and the game from the book)
- Minute 41 build up to a checkmate
Some great concepts from the video that sounded interesting and I never heard verbalised in such a way:
- Watching pieces - x raying checks where some pieces should be removed (clearance)
- Process of elimination (especially to evaluate best moves for the opponent, in particular when under check or when trying to trap a piece)
- Aggressive chess can be done with aggressive openings (open positions I would say, so start with e4!), that involve usually more tactics
- Yo yo technique (piece moving back and forth to capture other pieces, similar to windmill)
There was also a video in Russian, copying it for reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuR0UU4wtE4
I am actually checking also this video, I get the half of it, but it would be cool to start understanding also Russian chess content, that would probably open me another new world! The channel is called chess for everybody (in Russian) and sounds actually relatively easy to understand, I will check it out to start getting Russian chess terms.
