This forum is dedicated to all those 960 starting positions that seem to be dreadful for black to have to live through! Feel free to add to the list of examples. All is not lost! It is just that black must be highly resourceful. Often black needs to be extremely tuned into counter attacks if a chance emerges. For a counter attack may be black's only way to defend!
Here is a brilliant example of a strong defensive construct. In this starting position, white looks to be staring the black king down the barrel of a gun before the first move!
Black has a way to defend but great resourcefulness and creativity is required. You would think that black's big problem will be a vicious diagonal attack using white's queen and bishops. However black has a way to build a defensive structure against it. With a nice twist in the plot in this wonderful game, with the same simple defensive construct, black managers to deal with white's diagonal attack potential and a potential swarm attack on the black king with both white's knights.
The simple yet beautiful constructed defense d6/Nb6 seems to cover all these issues at least for a while! If you look at move two in the sequence 2.....Nb6, you begin to appreciate how white's knights are stalemated straight away! All the important squares that white's knights want to occupy to unleash the swarm attack are defended. The couple of squares that are not defended, are of no use to white's knights. Let's go through the list of those squares:
Immediately defended: d5, c5, c4
Defended by an absence of resource: a5, b4, d4
As you can see in the example above, the white human player (computer unassisted) is drawn to sitting a knight on a5 so as to weaken b7 to the point of collapse, but that is just not possible in reality. Beautiful stuff. To defend as black, you have to find an engineered construct that forms a physical defense, but also an indirect defense at the same time. One or the other is not good enough. In the example above, black now has a chance to produce counter attacking threats (as 3....g6 already did).
This forum is dedicated to all those 960 starting positions that seem to be dreadful for black to have to live through! Feel free to add to the list of examples. All is not lost! It is just that black must be highly resourceful. Often black needs to be extremely tuned into counter attacks if a chance emerges. For a counter attack may be black's only way to defend!
Here is a brilliant example of a strong defensive construct. In this starting position, white looks to be staring the black king down the barrel of a gun before the first move!
Black has a way to defend but great resourcefulness and creativity is required. You would think that black's big problem will be a vicious diagonal attack using white's queen and bishops. However black has a way to build a defensive structure against it. With a nice twist in the plot in this wonderful game, with the same simple defensive construct, black managers to deal with white's diagonal attack potential and a potential swarm attack on the black king with both white's knights.
The simple yet beautiful constructed defense d6/Nb6 seems to cover all these issues at least for a while! If you look at move two in the sequence 2.....Nb6, you begin to appreciate how white's knights are stalemated straight away! All the important squares that white's knights want to occupy to unleash the swarm attack are defended. The couple of squares that are not defended, are of no use to white's knights. Let's go through the list of those squares:
Immediately defended: d5, c5, c4
Defended by an absence of resource: a5, b4, d4
As you can see in the example above, the white human player (computer unassisted) is drawn to sitting a knight on a5 so as to weaken b7 to the point of collapse, but that is just not possible in reality. Beautiful stuff. To defend as black, you have to find an engineered construct that forms a physical defense, but also an indirect defense at the same time. One or the other is not good enough. In the example above, black now has a chance to produce counter attacking threats (as 3....g6 already did).
Cheers