Rough and Tumble

There's nothing quite like the excitement of a full-blooded tactical game of chess to get the pulse racing.  As the saying goes, chess is 99% tactics, so mastery of this aspect of the game pays dividends.  Or so I've heard.  If tactics sorts out the men from the boys (sorry ladies) then far too often I'm the little boy in the corner trying not to wet himself....

The trouble is that it's so easy to go astray when the analysis tree grows like a thicket and even with the luxury of being to move the pieces in correspondence games, one slip can be fatal.

In a recent game of mine against a friend at Chess.com I won a pawn, but had to accept a cramped position with awkwardly placed pieces and some weak pawns.  In the ensuing complications I thought I had the upper hand but it slipped away to a loss.  Analysing the game with Fritz afterwards, my silicon friend found tactics we both missed at the board - at one point the evaluation of the position by Fritz was as high as +18 for me (i.e. the equivalent of 18 pawns ahead! ) with equal material on the board. 

If only it were that simple!