Phases in learning chess, Phase Four to Six
Making the first real steps, grasping the deepness of chess and my own short comings. Also really starting to fall in love with the game, really because of the depths of the game. A couple of years into the decade of my youth, I saw the ‘Immortal Game’ for the first time, in some chess software there were several famous games to look at. I wanted to play like that, like Adolf Andersen.
We’re in the nineties, hard to imagine now but there was no such thing as online chess, the closest to any form of chess on computers were probably the first electronic chessboards which were not much of a challenge. So chess was played on the board, face to face,
no real other choices.
It wasn’t very popular in mainstream yet either, so I felt pretty lucky that one of my best friends and classmate liked the game as much as I did. We both were pretty evenly matched as well, I wonder if he still plays?! In my clique in school also another friend loved the game, she was in a chess club though and really learned the opening books. In this regard she was much better than me, yet as I recall we also played about fifty-fifty in results, then she won and the other time I won. But always frustrated with my not playing by the book. Let’s continue.
Phase Four (to six)
Last time I ended with frustrated opponents, I particularly remember a game on the board where I said ‘check’ about 26 moves in a row, devastating the opponent’s pieces and his mood. I mentioned the cursing, right? Most of the time I played with my friend, Henri, we went to school together and next to our school was a neighbourhood centre with coffee and chessboards.
Playing chess and talking about it inspired new ideas and ways to approach the game. We came to the conclusion that what was needed to win games was to do more than one move at a time.
So we discovered that when we hid a long distance piece behind another, we could multitask. Of course this is common knowledge, even has a name: discovered attack. But one can invent something that had already been invented when one doesn’t know it was… So we started lining up pieces behind one another.
Yes, I skipped the way too obvious fork, that was no epiphany in my view.
Discovered attacks (and even better discovered checks) were a strong weapon in the arsenal now. Best when one combines a (knight)fork with a discovered check, potentially doing three things with one move and gaining material.
At about that same time I discovered the strength and use of a pin, even though I had used it for years, I never really realised the use of leaving it like that. I played much too impatient, always wanting to attack and force things. Remember how in the first phases I realised that by trading pieces I force my opponent to take back, which makes one dictate the next move. While leaving a piece threatening a higher valued piece which is only blocked by a defended piece of equal value basically paralyses that piece. That took me a while to realise. Of course even better if that higher valued piece is the king. It is something many people overlook, that their piece is completely paralysed then and NOT defending other pieces.
The game began to be more and more fun.
At this time I started combining pins and discovered attacks with piece sacrifices. First building up pressure on the side where the king was by pointing my bishops in that direction, best with a knight in front of it, and when it were two or three pieces threatening the pawns in front of the king. I moved a pawn to the side so that the queen could come in to play and simply traded a bishop for a pawn, making a hole. In about 30% of the games this succeeded and it forced checkmate in just a few more moves. Against most players online this doesn’t work, because everybody sees what you are planning.
This is about my evolution in chess, I was about 12-14 years old at this time…
Next time (phases 7 to 9) ...and the first online games in 1998/1999
