Nova Daily - 10 March 2025

Hi!

In my previous blog I shared a quick overview of my thoughts about the dilemma between objectivity and practicality. People often have a proclivity for one of the two, to varying degrees, and it may be reflected in the type of opening repertoire that a player chooses to adopt. This thought came to me when I read this BC-S8 submission, in which the author distinguishes between theory-based openings and setup-based openings.

Although I love to approximate correctness to a large degree, I found that I tend to lean more to the practical orientation. The way I always played my openings is to get a basic understanding of the plans for both sides, see which moves would normally make sense, and then play several games to get a bit of a fingertip feeling for the opening. My opening knowledge has always been grossly overestimated, but I seemed to know what I was doing because I knew what type of middlegame structures I was aiming for and what plans these structures would involve. Thank you Daniel Rensch; thank you Mauricio Flores Ríos!

Perfectionism

Picture this scenario. You play in a FIDE-rated tournament and you get a great position by outplaying your opponent in one of your favourite variations. You still have an hour and 20 minutes on the clock, and you feel very comfortable that this will be an easy victory.

But at move 17, the opponent plays an obscure pawn sacrifice, which makes the game rather sharp. You vaguely remember having looked at this a long time ago, but you can't remember how you were supposed to deal with this provocative response, and no-one had ever played this pawn sac before. You try your hardest to remember what your favourite author wrote on the line, but you can't recall what it was no matter how hard you try.

The best chess move to play is not the best chess move, it's the move your opponent least wants you to play.

- Stephen Fry

You start calculating. A cursory glance at the clock reveals that you only have 45 more minutes left, and you realise that you still haven't found the right move to play. You have three candidate moves. Move A leads to an endgame that might be only mildly better. Move B seems promising, but it looks rather complex. Move C appears to lead to a tense position that looks hard to play, with the opponent having the bishop pair. You reject line A because you know that there should be more, and you decide to focus on line B.

Line B is so complex that you can't work out how exactly it works. But to your horror you discover that you only have 12 minutes left on the clock, as opposed to your opponent's 55 minutes. You've been staring at the position for more than an hour. You haven't even started to investigate move C. And you've invested so much time and energy into line B that there's no way back.

You decide upon move B. And right as you press the clock, you see what's wrong with it. You missed a zwischenzug. But your opponent does see it. And he goes for it. You refuse to resign and play on and on in a hopeless position, fearing the look on your coach's face. What should have been a straightforward win turns out to be the most painful defeat you've had in years.

A story like the one above is quite common. There's a lot of psychology behind perfectionism. To a very large part it stems from insecurity. For some reason you can't mentally afford to make mistakes. And so you'll be perpetually dissatisfied until you've completely covered all your tracks. The paralysis that Churchill mentions is the inaction that follows from not daring to make any decisions on the fear that it might be the wrong one.

How to avoid such a situation?

Good enough

In the above scenario, the player was faced with a choice between three moves (a slight advantage in the endgame, a tempting bur treacherous line, and an unbalanced position with the bishop pair for the opponent) and 80 minutes of thinking time on the clock to finish the game. 

Considering that move A can't ever be bad, this will be the backup plan. The player could then set himself a deadline of, say, 30 minutes to find a way to make move B or C work. If within the deadline this can't be done, the player should play move A, stand firmly behind it, leave the rest of the analytical work for after the game, and have a healthy amount of 50 minutes of time left on the clock to try to convert a risk-free advantage into a full point.

Even if move A isn't the very best move in the position, it's certainly good enough. And "good enough" is the best advice that I can give when dealing with a perfectionist.

(This method is based on Shereshevsky's The Shereshevsky Method, 2018.)

The game

At the end of yesterday's post, I expressed my wish to add the 2000 rating badge to my list of achievements this week. My wish was fortunately short-lived: I won my game today.

My thoughts:

It was a rather one-sided game because the pawn sacrifice turned out to be unsound. The state of white's development was such that there was no kingside initiative on the horizon, while black could trade off a lot of minor pieces.

The model games and the analysis section will follow tomorrow.

Model games:

It's critically important to realise that I missed an immediate pawn grab in the opening with 6...Bxf3 7.Qxf3 Nxd4. This would've led me straight to a significant advantage: with the d-pawn gone, white's control over the important dark squares is greatly diminished. The move occurs with an immediate attack on the queen, so white has no time to exploit the temporary vulnerability of the knight on d4. Black can retreat, put the central pawns on light squares, complete the development, and seek to put the material advantage to good use.

So, I missed a chance for an early opening advantage. However, the highest rated player to have been given this present didn't unwrap it either, so I'm in reasonably good company.

The following game shows black comfortably consolidating his position after winning the pawn in the opening.

The analysis:

It turns out I missed more than just this opening trick, but even after that the direction of the flow was one way.

What can I take away from this game:

1. Tactical alertness is very important. I could've made the game easy faring from the start if I had snatched the pawn on d4 early on. Winning material with 18...Nf4 would also have been considerably easier than what I did in the game, although I still got the Exchange a few moves later. And in the endgame, pushing c3 would've ended the game on several occasions.
2. In the opening, moves are often trade-offs of ideas, surrendering one idea in favour of another. Black's 5...Qc7 prioritises the control of e5 and the denying of white's Bf4 over the immediate development of the light-square bishop. White has two ways to react to this. The first is to play 6.h3, denying black's bishop the g4-square, so that white can play 7.Nf3 without having to worry about an awkward pin. The second is to force Bf4 in the position after all by means of 6.Ne2, and be able to answer 6...Bg4 with 7.f3. Even though this has its drawbacks too (f2-f3 loosens up white's kingside; the knight isn't ideal on e2), white will have dealt with the idea of the pin and facilitated the Bf4 move. 6.Nf3 is not the right idea: black can subject the knight to a pin and will have prevented the Bf4 move, with no drawbacks.
3. Keep stock of the types of advantages when deciding on a course of action. After 17.g3, the piece sacrifice 17...Bxg3 looks very tempting. But if I zoom out and look at the position at first, I can see that I have a static advantage in terms of the extra pawn and a majority in the centre. I don't need to complicate the position with such a sacrifice, even if it does work. In all fairness, the piece sacrifice would've given black a very large advantage, but it's not the only move that does.
4. Having been up two pawns, the transition into the rook endgame with 28...Rc4! wasn't just practical, it was objectively best. Such liquidation skills are in the GM's standard arsenal, and I was happy to spot one an opportunity to put it to practice here.