How To Attack An Uncastled King | Modern Masterpieces #6

It's the oldest and greatest lament of the chess coach—CASTLE YOUR KING! Time and time again, young students fail to take advantage of the most valuable single move in chess! Castling is the only time you can move two pieces at once. In a single stroke, you can provide luxurious safety to the most important piece on the board while getting his bumbling awkward behind out of the way of your fighting pieces, AND you can bring one of your second most valuable pieces from the corner to the center!

It's baffling to me that anyone wouldn't want to castle (the move even LOOKS cool!), but time and time again, students leave their monarch in the center to pursue harassing and prodding moves with their pawns and minor pieces. Against other new players, this may even pay off, but against a stronger opponent, failure to castle will soon lead to a build up of threats and initiative from the opponent against your central king. Before long, it won't be that you're choosing not to castle, it will be that you aren't ABLE to castle due to overwhelming threats and pressure.

Even stronger players can become distracted, miscalculate, or make some other error that costs them the right or the time to castle. Today's example game sees Super-GM Evgeny Bareev defeated in just such a fashion by the great, Peter Svidler.

100+ Modern Masterpieces Guaranteed To Improve Your Chess: The Opening

1. Almasi Crushes The Center - Modern Masterpieces: Control The Center
2. The Greatest Blitz Game Ever! - Modern Masterpieces: Develop Your Pieces
3. The Big Greek Immortal - Modern Masterpieces: Don't Push Too Many Pawns In The Opening
4. 3 Vicious Brilliant Moves - Modern Masterpieces: Don't Move Pieces Twice In The Opening
5. Five Queen Moves Refuted - Modern Masterpieces: Don't Bring Your Queen Out Too Early
6. Svidler Smashes Uncastled King - Modern Masterpieces: Castle Your King

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Bareev chooses to meet Svidler's 1.e4 with the French Defense, a trademark opening of Bareev, and an opening that I learned partially from his games. In the solid Rubinstein Variation, Bareev sets a foot astray with the natural ...h6?! instead of simply ...Be7 and castling. When Svidler captures on f6 and follows up with Qd3!, tactics prevent Bareev from castling, and suddenly he finds himself in serious trouble.

The quite short game features Bareev striving to play ...Be7 and castle while Svidler cleverly acts to make that difficult to achieve on each move. After his ...h6 inaccuracy, Bareev has no appealing choices, and in a difficult position, he allows Svidler a beautiful shot on move 17 that ends the game on the spot!