Art of Defense in Chess

Masters often claim that one should consider every reasonable candidate moves, analyze each of them once and only once and make a final decision about which move to play only after you are absolutely certain of its consequences. But in their own games masters often ignore all of this advice.They recognize a move that is so evidently good that to them it really is "obvious." In the position below, Black has just played Bc7. White immediately recognizes the simplest move: His rook is attacked and he can capture Black's rook with 1.Rxf8+. He also sees that 1.. Kxf8 would enable him to attack the h-pawn with 2.Qh5. And on 1..Bxf8 there may be something like 2.Qg4+. Every strong player would see this fairly quickly,regardless of whether they are "combinational" or "positional" or strategic" or whatever stereotype terms are used. They  all have the vision. 1.Ra7 White also noticed how this move would create at least three new tactical possibilities...

Masters The upper two percent of tournament players employ so shortcuts that they can play good moves at a glance,as they do in simultaneous exhibitions. They rely much more than other players on an intuitive sense of what the right move looks like and they are able to recognize the important elements in a position- when doubling a pawn matters and when it does not, for example. Moreover, masters are able to detect when they need to calculate and  when they need to calculate and when they can and should avoid it. They trust their level of expectation to tell them when they should look for a superior, second candidate or even a third. And they know how to balance subjective factors, such as the degree of risk in deciding what move to make. This is the introductory article of the masters section. Now you come to know why are these certain group of people are called "masters". Hope you liked the article. Keep reading and please share. Thank you!

Experienced Tournament Players- These players have mastered many of the basic techniques of move selection. They can spot a candidate that violates general principles. There are acquiring some intuition. They have also developed shortcuts in the second stage of the process. They know that in some positions they can safely halt their calculation after looking only two moves into the future, whereas in other positions they may have to look much further to be reasonably sure of a candidate's soundness. And in the third stage, their ability to evaluate goes far beyond that of lower-rated players. They will rarely conclude that a position is plus-over-minus when it is really equal. In the position below, White has just played 1. Ne5 and seems to be threatening 2. Nxc6. Black played 1...Nfd7!? Black knows it was not a threat eliminating the e5 knight is more important than granting White the two-bishop advantage and rupturing Black's queenside pawns. He stood well after 2. Qd...

In the following position, Black says to himself,"If I play Bxb3, he has to retake or he'll be a knight down. He will recapture towards the center,axb3. Then I reply Nb4 and I have a strong attack with Qa5 coming up." Black's tactical vision cant be faulted. After 1... Bxb3 2.axb3 Nb4 he would have a serious initiative, e.g. 3. Kb1 Qa5 followed by Rxc3 and Qa2+. The problem is not visualization but sloppy optimism. Black has not reached the level of sophistication to say "If I play Bxb3, I stand well if he recaputres with the a-pawn. But maybe that's not the best reply.What happens on cxb3?Hmm, if I paly Bc4 then he just moves his king to b1 and he is quite safe so maybe Bxb3 is not my best move." I think in this article I have got the thinkings of the intermediate chess players. After working hard on it, I have got the limitations of the intermediate chess players. My next article will be on how does an Experienced Tournament Player think and how can...

In the position below, White played 1.d4. A post-beginner sitting in Black's hair would likely overlook his opponent's possibilities, such as the threat of the pawn fork(2.d5). The novice might see the fork buy not the second threat(1..Bd7 2.d5 Na5 3.b4!). Instead, he spends a lot of time focused on his own candidates, such as 1...Nxe4. And he rarely considers the consequences of his moves. Improving Amateurs- Players in the next level avoid the mistakes of their past. They rarely put pieces en prise and they recognize most enemy threats. They can recognize a candidate as being "obvious." They look for a second candidate, even if the first one seems to be good. But the most important attribute of the improving amateur is that he has advanced to the second and third stages of move selection. He does not just pick candidates but also tries to analyze and evaluate the consequences of a candidate: " If I go there, what happens if he goes there?" He can calcul...

As a player improves, his move selection skills develop in a haphazard manner. Let's consider how players of different strengths decide which move to play. In the position given below, the players who just know the basics of the game can choose moves like Ba6 because he likes "long" moves. Another will prefer Nc4 or Ng4 because he thinks knight hopes harder for an opponent to deal with. A third will like pawn moves and try to build elaborate ziggurats by pushing the queenside pawns to c4,b5 and a4. We smile at their choices. But the post-beginners have already made a giant stride-perhaps the biggest they will make in their career even if they become grandmasters: They have developed some criteria for eliminating possibilities- the 39 legal moves for White here- to the small of moves they they trust. Post-beginners trust their criteria too much. Anyone who has seen a tournament room filled with very young juniors will be impressed by their quickness in finding a move the...

The situation is the same in livlier positions. At this moment White has 43 legal possibilities. After he played 20.Na5, Black had 33 possbile replies and chose a natural move Rfc8. Yet because of shortcuts, it is rare that human gives serious thought to more than three or four candidates at any turn. Masters usually consider fewer, not more candidates, than amateurs. The stronger the player, the better he is at avoiding calculation- and the more efficiently he thinks. Today's article was on how a strong chess players thinks and how he is different from the amateurs in calculating candidate moves. Hope you liked my article. I will be continuing my series on this topic. The more we go far the more advanced we study. So get ready for the next articles. Keep reading! Thank you Play Online Chess [Event "?"] [Site "Wijk aan Zee"] [Date "2005.??.??"] [Round "?"] [White "Leko"] [Black "Svidler"] [Result "*...

Today we are going to know what is  Elimination of candidate moves Selecting the most accurate chess move is a very difficult task. While we begin to take chess seriously,by reading books or playing in tournaments, we have forgotten how difficult the process is. We have forgotten because we take for granted various steps to save time. Without those shortcuts, selecting one move out of dozens of possibilities would seem impossible. White has 40 legal moves at his disposal and that's typical for the start of the middlegame. White had an average of 38 possibilities when making his 20th move. Black had an average of 34 possibilities when he replied. But only a chess engine examines 34.38 or 40 moves in a given position. The beginner learns to immediately dismiss some moves. . It takes more experience to realize that other moves  should be rejected  because they make little or no sense. Eventually a player goes beyond these and learns to recognize moves that are not on...