Today's Daily Puzzle 8/4/20: Forest First. Trees Second.
I couldn't help but think as I was spending a few minutes calculating different lines that Hikaru probably found the correct solution to this position in his game in a nano-second; it's a humble reminder that there's always more to improve on in chess!
No matter, I'm not a GM. I probably never will be, but I can work to improve every day! So, with that being said, how do we approach puzzles like the one today? The board seems chaotic and ripe with tension. There's forks, there's captures, there's checks. How do you even start?
I have a tendency in positions like these to just pick a line and start calculating. Sometimes, this even causes me to spend many minutes on one specific line ("tree") without first looking at the "forest" first. It's no wonder I usually run into time trouble in my games.
To be most efficient with your time when analyzing puzzles with a lot of tension, I find it best to first spend a handful of seconds simply zooming out and asking "what's going on?"
If we do that for today's puzzle we should discover a few things:
1. White's pieces are all defended. However, they are some are somewhat loose--only one piece is defending most of them and that means if the wrong one moves, there might be a piece en prise.
2. Black does have a potentially promising check on d2 with the knight. Obviously not now, since the c3 bishop defends but there may be a fork in the air.
3. Black has a lot of captures that may force white's pieces to move in a way that may achieve #1 and/or #2 above for a tactic.
Now that we've summarized the "forest" quite quickly, what are the candidate moves? Based on this I'd say: Bxc3 (removing the defender of d2), and Bxd5 (removing the defender of c3).
Ok! Now that we know what's going on in the position and we've identified two promising moves, it's time to calculate:
How did you do on today's puzzle? Did you start calculating right away or did you first zoom out and assess the position? Comment below!
Nick
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