Chess Tips: How To Start an Aggressive Attack

     Hi everybody! Welcome to my new series, Chess Tips. In this series, I will explain some useful tips you can use in your own games to boost your rating. In this, blog, I will tell you the 7 key princples on staying aggressive and destroy your opponent. I hope you enjoy my second blog!

1. Create an threat with each move.

Creating threats, like you might know, is the most important step of attacking. The threats might be as simply to attack an enemy piece, or creating mating threats. In the position below, it seens like white is losing its advantage. However, whites defends its advantage. Can you find the move? Yes. it is 1.Qg3! Not only this move protects his own knight, but also it threatens black’s knight, as well as prepares a discovered attack on the queen (after Nh5+). Now black will have to losing a piece.

2. Discover and add pressure to your opponent's weakness.

Weakness comes in different forms. However, to exploit them, you need to gather up all of your forces and add maximum pressure. In the example below, the material of both sides is equal. However, black have a extremely weak c pawn.Whites uses all of its forces to pressure the pawn. Some lower rated player might ask," but I can't win the c pawn!" What you might not understand is white have a huge advantage on piece activites. White can dominate the board because black is stuck defending the c pawn

3. Using pawns to open up the position: open files, ranks, and diagonals.

This rule is common sense. However, many begginer players missed or ignored the simple idea. In the position below, black is pretty greedy and gobbled up some pawns. However, his queen is misplaced and the player lacked development. Now what do you do to punish the vulnerable king? 1. D4! This moves prepares to open up the e file, where the black king is placed awkwardly.

4. Concentrate your pieces FIRST, then attack.

Before you launch a savage attack, you need to make sure that you did all the preparations. In the position below, white plays 1. Qh2 to triple stack. Next, white will do something like Ne5, focusing on the attack instead of getting greedy. NOT RUSHING is a important concept to remember.

5. Remove or exchange off key defenders.

Let’s take a look at the position below. White prepared an attack on the king’s side, by opening h-file and doubling up the rooks. But, white cannot advance onto h8 because of the black’s dark squared bishop The g7-bishop is the main defender in this position. White’s plan is to exchange it off. So, the move is obvious 1.Bc3!

6. Try to attack on both sides of the board.

This is a extremely powerful and high level technique. If your opponent is able to defend on 1 side, then go to the other side to win material. 

7. Avoid exchanges if you have an advantage.

Even though you should exchange off the key defenders in the opponent’s position, you should avoid unnecessary tradings since it will only benefit your opponent. Fewer pieces mean fewer attacking possibilities and fewer things to worry about. That’s not what we should go after. (There is a typo in the position below. The word is " Wouldn't", not "would. Pls keep that in mind. Thank you.)

That is all for this blog! Thank you so much for reading it, I really appreciated it and pls comment if you learned something new! I hope you have a nice day! If you are curious about what my next blog is going to be, it will be about defending.