Attacking Chess: Introduction to Non-Forcing Moves

Warning: This post will take some time to work through, and is meant to be more of a lesson rather than an article. Take your time on these, as that is the best way to get anything out of it. Your time can not be better spent than solving these exercises!

A popular thought process is the idea of calculating the forcing moves as it helps one calculate tactics easier. This is great and invaluable - however we mustn't misinterpret the lesson to mean that the forcing move is always the right move.

I should reemphasize that it is mainly to calculate tactics, and for everything (and there is a lot) else we should be using different thought processes.

Remember, the idea here is to be open to more than just one option. Even if the first thing that comes to our mind looks "forced," we should look for something else, at least for a moment. We will be focusing on how considering also the non-forcing moves helps in attacking chess:

White played a strong positional sacrifice in 18. Rxd7, and if he had only been looking at the forcing lines, it would have been impossible to evaluate the position correctly as winning for White. Black has all the long term advantages - but a strong attacker knows to bring in all the pieces into play, note 19. Bd3! It is not "forcing" yet it is the strongest move nonetheless.

Next time we will look at 19...g6, we will find that this is a tougher nut to crack.

This is a series of articles on attacking chess - the analysis of original thus I apologize in advance if there are inaccuracies - though I doubt there will be many. I hope you found this useful, but regardless, I would appreciate it if you left a comment below with your feedback. Best of luck.

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