plans within plans and pins within pins

previously i noted my flaw of planning out an attack and following it through to completion without considering other opportunities that may have come up. after the sequence ends im starting from scratch with trying to come up with the next plan.

i wanted to have my plans flow into each other. and in this slow practice game against jade-bot i was able to fulfill that promise and make plans within plans within plans.

jade-bot opened with kc6, the reti. i recognized this as being something that could go in a couple different directions, so i went kc3 to remain flexible until the bot revealed its intentions. it followed with english, which i havent studied at all, but it made sense to go c6 to support a future d5.

almost 100k games in the database have reached this:

“find the book move” is a fun puzzle, and im getting pretty good at finding them for the first 3 or 4 moves of a game. im really getting my moneys worth out of the defeating pet openings course, which helped me learn to think like a book.

i was surprised when jade-bot went knight c3, allowing me take on c4, which made me suspect a trap. but it seemed like taking was the principled thing to do, and fortunately, the book agrees. its still in the tens of thousands of games.

my first non-book move was after jade-bot went a4. a4 felt so random to me i couldnt imagine it being book, but apparently it was. the book intends this move to eventually kill off my c pawn, but little does book know that my c pawn is a hero. 

a4, which i did not know was a legit move, suggested a potential line that immediately fascinated me. if it was book, i knew it would likely be too early to bring out my queen, but if it wasnt book, the move should probably be punished. i could see arguments both for and against the queen move, and so i chose based on the ultimate tiebreaker, which was that it looked like more fun.

ive been practicing applying different pin ideas to games and not just puzzles, and i really couldnt resist the double pin of queen a5. thats one piece ruining the day of four enemy pieces at the same time. and with my pawn so far forward, together they felt like they could control and cramp the queenside. im always looking out for hero pawns, and hero pawn needs backup.

i later found out that the analysis thought this queen move was !?, but the way it played out was everything i could have dreamed and more. the fight for the center was abandoned and the pin wars began.

with the knight pinned, i was keeping an eye out for ways to take advantage of the unprotected e4 square. whats the point of pinning if u dont use it? i wanted to develop a bit more and prepare to castle, keeping this possibility in mind. i wanted to keep white’s pieces as blocked in as possible, maintaining pressure and not opening up the board with needless trades. 

when white blocked the pin using the queen, it was all the excuse i needed to bring my dark squared bishop into the pin pile to create the perfect battering pin to counter the pinbreak attempt.

the engine doesnt like this bishop move at all, and maybe at a higher level its not ideal. but for this game, the bishop is what keeps the enemy knight in a strong pin so that I can infiltrate with the e4 move ive been looking forward to, which has just become a very tasty looking knight fork. 

why would i not want this fork? why would i not go bishop b5 to get it? where else are whites pieces gonna go in the meantime, as bogged down as they are by my queen pawn coordination?

i spent so long preparing and calculating for this that im glad the analysis thinks its brilliant. perhaps it wouldnt have been possible if jade-bot played better, but i sure had fun getting this far, and it was only phase 1 of the plans within plans.

is it time to attack? what order is best? what other tactics can i throw in there? can i zwischenzug anything?

the engine recommends going in with the knight first, then bishop. i considered the exact sequence it recommends, but after seeing that white would probably block with their bishop in the end, and predicting that it was so obvious even the 1300 elo bot would play it that way, and id come up just one pawn, that did not feel very fun. the one pawn would come at the cost of ending the attack and completely relieving the pressure. 

i wanted an attack that would flow right into more potential tactics that take advantage of how my pieces are coordinated and how whites pieces are stuck. i had resolved to practice having plans within plans, and knight first would end the plan.

bishop first, and then knight, looked like much more fun. it seemed tactically sound for as many moves ahead as im capable of calculating. the analysis, meanwhile, thought it was an actual blunder.

do u see a blunder? honestly, can u see it?

the computer needed 6 moves to try to prove the sequence would end with me down on material, moves neither i nor jade-bot thought of and that i still dont find clear. even if jade-bot had found all 6 moves it woulda left me down a knight but up another pawn, down 1 point of material overall. which… i could do worse. im new. any sequence of 6 top engine moves is going to wear me down if not outright destroy me.

maybe itd be a blunder if i were playing against a grandmaster or a super chessbot, but with my over-two-weeks of chess experience i can authoritatively say that i stand by my knight move for this game at this level.

it wanted me to trade queens instead! why would i trade queens when my queen is a power queen messing up whites whole day, and its queen just sits around being useless and stuck and unable to threaten anyone? meanwhile putting the knight there last, after the bishop and instead of the queen, means white isnt forced to take it. i dont want to trade, i want my queen knight pawn superhero team free to wreak further havok. 

and havok they wrought.

since my pawn was being so fun and useful i brought up another. i made an actual blunder, and missed that whites other bishop had gotten unstuck, so i lost the original super pawn. i had plans within plans but couldnt see a hanging pawn in sight of a bishop three squares away. thats just where im at. but i was determined to bring the other pawn to greatness, and that would require getting it past the well-protected b3 square. so i started eyeing knight moves.

there was no rush on the knight, as white couldnt do much without actually improving that move. i finally took a moment to castle, and white decided to improve my position indeed.

the knight move became obvious. but what im proud of is that before i even moved it i was already planning the zwischenzuggability of getting hero pawn past the dangerous square, or, if white was super clumsy, going straight for a back rank check with the newly unblocked queen.

it worked exactly as desired, and i got my pawn promoted in the end. super pawn carried on the legacy of the d pawn which pulled more than its weight and lived beyond its years at c4. book would have seen it left to die on move 7, but the game i played was much more fun.

my plans within plans were finally all complete, and the game was straightforward after that. we traded down, i chased and checkmated.

i did get a pawn taken en passant that i didnt see coming because i have never once remembered to consider en passant. i havent done an en passant myself yet, but i should probly make that a goal just so i remember to look for it. at least i remembered i can still move my pawn 2 spaces even in the endgame, which has been a goal. now that im getting better at that maybe its time for me to start remembering en passant exists.

for this game, it didnt matter. it was overwhelming victory. jade-bot may have made some mistakes that i was able to exploit, but unlike all the other bots it didnt make any major blunders that immediately gave away pieces for no reason. it didnt feel like it straight up let me win, unlike the easier bots. even though technically it kind of did, and im sure to a better player its obvious it played terrible moves. but i had fun and i got to practice the idea of plans within plans.

studying the opening:

that off-book queen on move 5 apparently brought the game from 20k on record to only 10 in the database. and of those 10, black overperforms, especially when ratings differences are considered. so i stand by my queen move. 

i havent actually studied any master games yet cuz im new, but i just discovered that u can actually look at the games that went similar to ur opening: https://www.chess.com/games/search?fen=rnb1kb1r/pp2pppp/2p2n2/q7/P1pP4/2N2N2/1P2PPPP/R1BQKB1R%20w%20KQkq%20-%201%206 

(wow, look at that url. try decoding it if u want another kind of chess puzzle.)

its so neat that u can look up games that started the same way as urs! this is so cool!

im looking at them to see how they continued the game, and its so wild to look at someone elses game that looks just like urs to start. im sure many of u have gotten used to seeing the same openings over and over, but this is my first time studying this way. ive seen chess games in fiction and on tv before but i didnt know enough about chess to follow any of it.

in the 10 real games with the same non-book queen move i did, the queen pin is always responded by bishop d2. this develops the bishop and blocks the pin, so that makes sense. its also what the engine recommends.

but what i care about is whether any real games double down on the pin pressure and keep coordinating with hero pawn. a bunch of the games have the queen immediately strafing to f5. but three of them, in our sample size of 10, leave the queen there and eventually end up with the same bishop queen battery.

https://www.chess.com/games/view/15534761 

https://www.chess.com/games/view/15867027 

https://www.chess.com/games/view/1208943 

its kind of cool to see that same battery pattern appear in games that have otherwise taken different directions. i guess this is what people talk about when they talk about how good chess players recognise patterns that come from certain openings even tho every game gets so unique so fast. i guess if i keep playing, ill start seeing all sorts of things like that.

but also, it seems like the winningest plays dont get attached to keeping the pin and the pawn, they allow the threat to create a response and then they move on to other parts of the board.

i think at my level its fun and good to play out these coordinated threats and understand why a high level player would immediately see them and block with the right moves. and someday i will be able to enjoy the idea of my battering pin and super pawn while also knowing my opponent is equally enjoying that same idea and defending against it, and then we can both move on and enjoy other ideas that are even more entertaining.

chess is pretty interesting, i can see why people like it