Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Chess

I’ve played a few games of chess with one of my coworkers over e-mail. I think I’m getting better, although I still occasionally do something really stupid, or almost do something stupid but catch myself before I hit Send – although if I were in a real game I probably would have made the move. So that’s lame. I sort of think of the following levels of chess skill:

  • Novice: Learning the rules
  • Beginner: Knows the rules, learning tactics like forking and forcing checkmate with limited material
  • Intermediate: Knows about forking, pinning, etc. and how to watch out for them. Learning overall strategy
  • Advanced: Understands strategy, learning patterns of moves like well-known openings
  • Masterly: Can look at notation and form a picture of what happened, thinks a zillion moves ahead, etc.

I’m in the Intermediate category, and I’m pretty content to stay there, for two reasons:

  1. I have no interest in memorizing sequences of moves.
  2. Almost nobody is advanced, and the game’s no fun if you win all the time.

I don’t actually have a lot more to say on the matter except that I‘m pretty pleased with a comeback I recently had. Here’s where it all turned around. I had lost a rook due to stupid oversight (got my king away from a potential fork only to lose my rook anyway to a rook + queen fork). But instead of capturing my opponent’s knight, I sacrificed some material in order to lure his king out into the open.

(Excuse the bad HTML – one of the few weaknesses of Windows Live Writer.)

Oh, and for the record, this same opponent has beaten me soundly on his fair share of games. I’m not gloating here – I’m just glad my last-ditch effort pulled off!

 

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So my opponent (White – as in white text) has just captured my rook at A8. I could take his knight with my rook and even things out a little, but I figure his king is just waiting to castle. And if he does that, I’m in big trouble. (Note how he’s already punched holes in my line of pawns – my own king isn’t exactly safe.)

So instead,  I (black) move N E5. Now I’m threatening N D3 + (the “+” is “check”). White is evidently not worried though. He moves N B6 – his knight is still in danger, but now he’s got an additional pawn out of the deal.

 

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Now, finally, I take his knight. But now he gets to take my knight too – so instead of being behind in a knight-rook trade, I’m behind by a whole rook (plus the extra pawn he already had before this disaster). But here comes the good part: Q A6 +
 

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As an aside, I had recently read about “fianchetto”, which is where you stick your bishop next to the corner (in this case, G7) and leave it there, guarding the long diagonal. In this case, it works out beautifully because my queen and bishop are working together to create this huge space in the center of the board where the king can’t go. His only choice is to move farther and farther out into the board. I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out where to go from there, but here’s the final board.

 

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(Note how Q A3 would have prevented me from advancing that pawn until I got my king clear of that diagonal, but it would have just delayed the inevitable.)

(Maybe a better exercise for the reader would be go figure out how to win as white. But whatever.)

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