Reverse Engineering an Attack #2

There are two important but opposing forces governing chess: strategy and tactics.  Both are essential, of course  Every move needs to be tactically justified, as otherwise you will drop material time and time again.  If the focus is only on tactics, though, then your position will never improve and may even collapse, not from one single blow, but from the accumulation of many small ones.  Death by a thousand papercuts, if you will.

This is a common way of looking at chess, but in truth, strategy and tactics are much closer together.  They do not oppose each other; if anything, they complement each other.  In today’s video, I go through strategic and tactical motifs of a recent game, and I try to show how noticing the strategic elements aids in navigating the tactical waters that follow.

The first half shows the general strategic outline of the game, for context, and then I reverse engineer the final attack to deeply understand the tactics themselves, but also the strategic elements that made it possible in the first place.  My previous work on reverse engineering an attack was popular, so hopefully this one proves just as valuable.

As always, comments and feedback are appreciated, and they can help me craft new videos in the future.  Thanks for watching.