Explaining Critical Positions

Hello All,

Could some strong players explain a little bit about critical positions? This is a term I've often heard but feel like I still don't understand the clear definition of while going over chess books or watching a lecture. Statements such as "Now we've reached the critical position," "This is the first critical position," "This is the critical line in this opening" often come up. During the candidates tournament going on right now Magnus Carlsen commented that Garry Kasparov once said the difference between an average grandmaster vs very strong grandmasters is that the average player doesn't recognize all the critical positions.

So what exactly defines this? Is it when all the pieces are developed and the position has reached a pressure point? Is it when one side needs to make an active move to keep an advantage or risk losing it?

I hope someone can clear this up for weaker players and maybe give some examples of critical positions and and show why it is critical. Possibly in the QGD, Nimzo Indian, or Najdorf, so that we might better understand this concept a little bit.

Cheers and thanks

A critical position has objective and subjective features.

Objectively, it's a position where the difference between the best and 2nd best move is large. For reasons given below, this usually involves irreversibly choosing a major theme like attacking on the kingside vs playing in the center. An easy example is a pawn move that starts a pawn storm against the enemy king.

Subjectively it's a position where the player isn't strong enough to fully foresee the consequences of the decision. As another easy example, if someone captures your queen, recapturing it to restore material equality is an irreversible and important decision... but it's so obvious that no one calls it critical. This is why a critical position usually also involves a major theme or idea like an attack. Its far reaching consequences can't be completely understood. So what you or I call critical may be true for us, but if the decision is obvious to a GM they would not call it critical, they'd just call it obvious.

So lets talk about that for a bit. Critical positions are also positions that will take extra time. During a game, players budget their time so that they can give extra thought to critical positions. A professional game may last 6 or 7 hours, which to an amateur may seem like an eternity. Surely that's enough time to play your best on every move right? Nope. A pro may spend 1 hour on a single move, so a few hours for a whole game isn't nearly enough. Ideally the majority of time is spent on positions that matter the most. These are positions where the difference between the best and 2nd best move is large, and the ideas set in motion are irreversible and complicated. These positions are referred to as critical.

So a critical position is a position where:

1) The 2nd best move is not good enough
2) The best move is difficult to determine (usually due to long term consequences)
3) Making this determination is part of overall time management

Thanks for this explanation, it does seem more clear now than what I had previously thought. Recently I had a tournament game where I was playing white in the slav. My opponent was pressuring my c3 knight out of the opening with moves like Bb4 and Qa5 etc but then played a move that allowed me a tactic to win a bishop for two pawns. Soon after, he made a couple of suspicous queenside pawn moves and I went on to recover the 2 pawns and win the game. I was thinking of this game and I am wondering - the early pressure on the knight is obvious, the knight needs relief and I do not want to lose a pawn or suffer a check on c3 - the tactic to win a piece was an obvious advantage - if an opponent makes a tactical mistake early on such as this while you are replying to forcing moves, is there any position there which is critical at all? Is it possible for a game to not have a critical position? Or perhaps after the intial fireworks have been settled and I am 1 piece ahead, then figuring how to win the game from there is the critical point?

Yeah, it's possible for a game to not have a critical position. For example if practically every move is good, but a person blunders mate in 1, so then the opponent plays mate in 1. It was just a big blunder, nothing critical.

In your game, since the engine is never really showing a player loses more than 1.00 points of material for finding the best vs 2nd best move, I'm a little hesitant to call any position critical. I guess I'd say maybe move 10 for white and 13 for black since that's sort of when the players are deciding will I give up / win a piece, and where is the compensation. After white breaks the pin with 14.Qc2 the rest of the game plays out pretty calmly I'd say.

I guess I'd say labeling a move as critical after a game isn't very useful. It's better to look at your time management and judge whether you were taking long thinks appropriately. At some point between moves 7 and 14 you probably should have taken a long think where you did your best to fully calculate more than one line, and then chose the line you thought was better. 20% of your total time is probably fair since the tactics mean someone can come out a piece ahead. Using 5% or 50% of your time during that period is probably careless.

Wtf is the point of this gif post

As soon as kibi gets his rating back over 2200 he likes to spam... usually in topics I start, not topics I post in, but I guess kibi saw me posting here and thought it was a good idea.

op,  block kibi. Since that post tried to derail the original topic. I am very much sarcastic.