How do I attack?

I am rated 1498 and I have trouble attacking. I feel like in my games I develop my pieces, and then start to attack, but my opponent seems to always defend well and it seems impossible to breakthrough. In Daniel Naroditsky's speed run he develops his pieces and proceeds to destroy his opponent. What am I missing? How do I attack?

Ok, but that's a bit misleading. Naroditsky is a GM, so he's not "just developing pieces" he's choosing pawn structures and development schemes that will give him opportunities later.

And when he attacks, he's not randomly making threats. If he doesn't see how or why an attack will work, he'll just keep making calm moves, building up his position.

Strong players don't attack when they feel like it, they attack when the position allows it (or demands it).

To answer the title though, it's very useful to be familiar with various checkmate patterns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkmate_pattern

It might seem tedious, but going through that list every now and then until you feel like you could set up most of them on your own (on a board where you can just move pieces around on your own) is a good thing to do.

That will help you plan an attack and guide your calculation. It gives you a destination in mind (so to speak).

To help with the initial moves, play over GM games that feature an attack and pay attention to things like opening lines near the enemy king (meaning open files, and diagonals) and brining more attackers. Usually you need at least 3 attackers pointed at the enemy king before you start attacking.

Once you have the initial ideas and end ideas in mind via study, you fill out the middle with your ability to calculate, in other words solving tactical puzzles will help.

How can I learn to do that? I do a lot of puzzles, but they never come in handy become I never have those sort of opportunities. For example when I play against bots that attack a lot like Paul Morphy, I don't understand how they create these attacking opportunities.

We posted at the same time, so maybe you didn't see my post before asking. Hopefully my 2nd posts answer your question.

It does, thanks!

If you want to attack in any position, you must first know the “assault ratio” as tal put it. The number of your pieces should outnumber your opponents pieces in one area of the board.

The easiest way is just to show an example of your own games. Then you can see the immediate difference between your way of thinking compared to other players.

Here are some example games :

Here I was playing as black before I played Ng4, I wanted to attack, and when you get a 1500 player who wants to attack and is tilted and can't calculate, you are probably going to lose. I am embarrassed by this game. I didn't know how to orchestrate an attack. Instead of Ng4, the computer wanted me to play a4, which I kinda get, but every time I say "I'm gonna push my pawns and win the game" he just moves his knight and plays a3 and stops my attack.  I don't understand because I have all my pieces out. (By the way, I've never seen this opening which is a reason I played weird moves in the opening. By the way, im bad at calculating because I thought I would sack the knight, play Qf6+ then take the knight forgetting that my queen would be attacked in that case. Basically this is how a lot of my games have been going recently. I develop my pieces. Wow I'm great at the game. Ok now let's attack the opponent. Oops, self destruction mode activated.

Another game example is this one where I kinda have an attack but somehow he just holds on and then I forget how to play chess : 

I played as Black again
He even moves the king from my pin and I just have nothing.

Should I not try to attack the king and just wait for my opponent to blunder? or just fight for pawns?

Took a look at your last 2 losses. It looks to me that you are trying too much to attack sometimes. Botvinnik once told Kasparov something like this: "Slow down Garry. Give your opponent a chance to make mistakes."

I understand your point learttahja, but didn't paul morphy attack a lot? I guess I don't know when it's transitions from the "fighting for the center" faze and transitions into the "checkmate" faze

A good rule of thumb is to try not to attack from the start. I see you're pushing the h pawns, trying to get something going like in the second game - small problem. All of your pieces are either on the back rank undeveloped or they're on the queenside. How do you expect your attack to succeed like that? 

I have been playing now for about 6 months and seem to be getting worse and losing a lot. I have been doing a lot of puzzles to try to improve. Any advice on playing better what should I be doing?

Thanks, canvasweve@morrisbb.net       weve34

Use the principles in your games.

Look at games of masters of the past like Morphy or Steinitz on chessgames.com .

Pick up books for your level like 'Logical chess move by move' and study them over and over.

Keep playing and doing puzzles.

Analyze your games to find out what mistakes you made and how to avoid doing them again.

It doesn't have to go from 0 to 100 that quick. Try hard not to blunder and follow the principles.

If your opponent breaks them, then its time to attack. This is what Naroditsky teaches a lot in his videos.

By doing lots of tactics you should be developing a feel for when your opponent blundered.

Your thread seems to be based on a misconception.

You do NOT gain the advantage by attacking. Just the opposite, in fact. An unmotivated attack will simply hand the advantage over to your opponent.

Attacking is a method... and not the only method... of converting an already-existing advantage to a more readily usable form. For instance, you might attack in order to convert an advantage in development into an advantage in material (by winning a piece, for example).

You GAIN the advantage by out-maneuvering your opponent. You CONVERT that advantage by attacking.

How can I learn to do this @blueemu. Or how do I know when it's time to strike? Another point of this thread is even if I have 2 more pieces attacking the king then he has defending, I don't know how to attack

First you need to learn how to recognize advantages of different types, and how to know when a particular advantage is important and when it makes little practical difference.

For example, an advantage in development is increasingly important the more OPEN the position is. Having three more pieces developed than your opponent does can be devastating in an open position, important in a semi-open position, or quite meaningless in a closed position.

A corollary to that is the idea that if you are WAY ahead of your opponent in development, you should commence your attack by OPENING the position as much as possible... in order to leverage your superior development.

Try reading my posts on the first two or three pages of this thread, and playing over the example games:

GM Larry Evans' method of static analysis - Chess Forums - Chess.com

One thing to do is start making a collection of short attacking sequences. They can be from GM games, as well as from the analysis of your own games. As the collections grows, you'll start to notice common ideas. Review your attacking collection from time to time and you'll sometimes see similarities you missed before. For example in your game:

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When I look at the other game I think it's worth mentioning some attacking basics. The very simplified idea is you open lines, and then your piece use those lines. Let's look at your game with that in mind.

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Of course slow building up for an attack is fine, but usually not after you sacrifice a piece  

The next tip didn't really happen in your game, but the other thing I'll say about pawn storms is I see a lot of low rated players (even as high as 1800 OTB) seem to misunderstand that pawns block your pieces.

A pawn storm isn't some magical thing that makes attacks work, it has a very specific function, and that's to open lines for your pieces to use (or at least restrict the opponent's pieces from defending against your active pieces). If your pawns end up blocking the lines your pieces are using then the pawn storm is completely pointless.

This didn't really happen in your game, but it made the moves f5-f4 look even worse to me, because you're cutting off one bishop and then the other. That's just not something healthy attacks tend to do very often unless you're still in the slow building up phase.

This is good advice of course, and I'll add that I'm often impressed by GMs when they switch from one to the other. For example a large attack is successfully defended, but as a consequence their opponent will face a bad endgame. What does the GM do? Of course he recognizes the attack is over, and proceeds to calmly win the endgame. A lesser player (like me) might desperately try to force the attack to work and as a result lose the game.

So it's a good point that you don't attack because you want to, you attack when the position allows it (and as blueemu says, mating attacks happen after you've gained an advantage of some sort. Attacks cash in on the advantage, they don't create the advantage).