Jon Speelman's Agony Column #2

ChessBase Agony Column #2 Wednesday May 18th 2016

This week I thought we'd look at tactics and calculation. These two topics which are intertwined are perhaps the most crucial aspect of chess since positional play, however refined, will get you nowhere if you blunder.

As with everything else at the chess board, the most important thing is to try to orientate yourself and to make reasonable demands both on the position and yourself. If you try to attack when your opponent has a strong defensive position then the attack normally ought to founder. If you believe that there ought to be a winning line then if you can't find a knockout in a reasonable time, look for something simple which gives you sufficient advantage.

Conversely, don't try to find the perfect line which is so complicated that it bamboozles you. There are very few perfectionists today even among the world's very top players with the exception of Alexander Grischuk: and he has a terrible propensity for time trouble however well he then handles it.

We start with a very interesting position from a game by Dave Couture: a software engineer in his fifties from Massachusetts rated in the 1800s who has produced an ebook Progressive Tactics available on Amazon. The "Agony" he sent me was indeed horrible – a game where he won a rook early on and then "played down to his opponent's strength" to the extent that he managed to lose. We'll therefore draw a veil over it but the "Ecstasy" is most interesting: a win against Carissa Yip one of America's most promising young female players and still now only in her early teens.

Dave Couture v Carissa Yip, Position after 18.Bb4 (Black to play)

The main position I want to highlight is the diagram where before looking at the game below you might like to consider two questions.

1. Can you give a general assessment of what is going on?
2. How might Black try to take action immediately (nothing tremendous, just an idea).

The other games this week are both online efforts at PlayChess by Alfonso Lagman Jr, an NHS Biomedical scientist originally from the Philippines. He lives in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire in the south of England and plays exclusively online. He was the winner of both games but sad that in the second he had allowed his opponent a chance during what had otherwise been a very nice game.

I'm just going to look at the critical positions.

Many thanks for your continuing emails which are the life blood of this column. Please do send games – preferably a pair of "Agony" and "Ecstasy" but a single good game is also fine. The best format is either ChessBase .cbv or .pgn as an attachment. I can also lift games in text format from the body of an email and paste them into the growing database.