In an attempt to continue to think of myself as an “active” chess player rather than a retired one, I will be playing a little tournament chess this summer after about a year of inactivity. It’s been helpful to work on chess more frequently through this blog, but preparing to play at a reasonably high level after such a long layoff requires something more.
Preparation for a tournament often gets conflated with memorization of opening lines. I’ll take a look at opening preparation in a future post, but for now it’s important to keep in mind that the vast majority of chess games are decided by which player has calculated more accurately and more deeply into the position. It’s hard to free oneself from the opening industrial complex, publisher of manuals, informants, and online courses, but it’s important to move past the false comfort of having a lot of stuff memorized to get to the actual benefit of being able to execute chess ideas with skill and confidence.
My favorite place for getting my calculation muscles back into shape is chesstempo.com, where I’m closing in on 4,000 puzzles completed over the past decade and change. The puzzles on Chess Tempo are all from real games and each requires a specific winning move (or series of winning moves). Being forced to be accurate as I do these exercises helps me shift my calculation from sloppiness and laziness (“I guess I’ll play this, sure hope it works”) to clarity and precision (i.e., this variation wins because of the fork on e2 at the end).
The exercises on Chess Tempo aren’t a perfect facsimile of tournament play, since you go in knowing that there is one and only one solution, but in my opinion they’re close enough to the real thing to be quite helpful. I’ll go through the first five problems I attempted to solve this week, with some commentary on what they revealed about my current level of calculation. If you scroll only as far as each diagram you can try to solve each one yourself before reading my comments.
Problem #1
My initiation reaction was that this should be a fun problem: the black king is without moves in the middle of the board, so any check could easily be mate. How about 1 Re6+? OK, that doesn’t work: 1 Re6+ Qxe6 2 fxe6 Rc1+ 3 Kg2 Rc2+ and drawn in a couple different ways.
Wait, maybe there’s a deflection tactic! I’ll play 1 Qh8+ Qxh8 2 Re6#. Crap, 1… Qxh8 is check, so that blunders the queen and loses. Third try: a lot of tactical problems are solved by combining a couple of themes, so 1 Re6+ Qxe6 2 Qh8+ Qf6 3 Qb8+ Qd6 4 Qe8+ Kf6 5 Qg6+ Ke7 and … there’s nothing there, white just has to resign.
At this point I decided that my candidate moves were no good and that I needed to widen the net, but I had trouble finding moves that didn’t lose (1 Qb2? Qh5+ 2 Kg2 Qh3# for example) and became unreasonably depressed about white’s chances. By process of elimination I finally settled on the right move: 1 Qh7! (queen stays on the h-file, opens up a square for white king on h2, threatens Qg7#) 1… Rc1+ 2 Kh2 Rc2+ 3 Bg2 (here’s where my analysis ended; I assumed the problem would end here as well) 3… Rxg2+ 4 Kxg2 Qa8+ (oops, didn’t notice that one) 5 Qb7 (I felt a little fortunate to have this move, the only one that prevents mate) 5… Qxb7+ 6 Rxb7 and white will convert the extra exchange.
I got the right answer, but my process was bad, based on knowing that there had to be a winning variation somewhere. Missing black’s Qa8+ felt like a pretty big problem, since not noticing the opponent’s counterplay is such a typical way to lose a winning position.
Problem #2
I was not happy to see this problem appear; I don’t particularly enjoy calculating defensive variations. My primary difficulty in these sorts of positions is the overwhelming fear of getting checkmated, so I decided to start by eliminating some stupid variations that I could laugh at, such as 1 Kh1?? Nf2++ 2 Kg1 Qh1# and 1 Kf1? Nxf4 2 Ke1 Nxd3 3 Qxd3 Qh1+ and so on.
Thanks again to process of elimination, it was time to work on 1 gxh3, where I initially hallucinated 1… g2 2 Nf3 Qh1+ 3 Kf2 g1=Q+ and black wins. It took me longer that I like to admit that I had black play g2 and Qxh3 simultaneously (when you’re afraid of your opponent’s ideas sometimes you let them play them all at once); armed with the right position in my head I rejected 1 gxh3 g2 2 Nf3 Qxh3 3 Nh2 as too passive—3… Rg3 already seems like a serious problem. It seemed better to defend the h-pawn: 1 gxh3 g2 2 Be2! and here the problem conveniently ended without forcing me to find 2… Rxg3 3 Rxg3 Rxg3 4 Bf3, an idea I had noticed but hadn’t checked as thoroughly as I should have, given how sharp the position is.
Problem #3
The theme here is pretty simple: white is going to try to find a way to deliver mate on the a1-h8 diagonal. The problem is really a decision between two candidate moves that set up Qxe5: 1 Bxc8 and 1 Bd7. Many winning positions have multiple winning solutions, but not on Chess Tempo, so I tried to figure out the difference between the bishop moves. This level of attention to detail is a good habit to be in: time permitting, we should always ask ourselves if there’s anything wrong with a variation that seems to be obviously winning. In this case, 1 Bxc8? fails to 1… Qxb5!, threatening Qf1# and the Bb2, a trap I fell into the first time I tried to solve this puzzle over a decade ago. This time I got it right: 1 Bd7! Qd8 2 Qxe5! f6 3 Qe6+ and wins.
Problem #4
I’d like to think I would have solved this position more quickly if I had played the game to this point rather than jumping when only the final blow was needed. The problem is that I spent a lot of time trying to make 1 Rxh6+ work (it does not). My thinking was affected by the need to find something fast, as black is on the verge of breaking through against the white king. Eventually I asked myself how quick black’s play really was and realized that white has one tempo to play with. Time again to widen the net. 1 Rg1 is an attempt to rehabilitate the Rxh6+ idea, but black plays 1… Qb6+ and there’s no good spot to park the white king.
I finally, slowly noticed that another way to make use of the powerful white queen was to take advantage of black’s weak back rank. As soon as I saw it, I knew that 1 Rhc3! was the winning move, and after 1… Qb6+ 2 Kg2! (not 2 Kf3? Rxb3) it’s time to resign.
Problem #5
I’m pretty sure that I’m worse at rook endings than any other kind of position on Chess Tempo. This nagging self doubt didn’t help me solve this problem: I first tried 1… Rd2 2 d7 Kf8 3 b4 cxb4 4 c5 b3 5 c6 b2 6 c7 b1=Q 7 d8=Q+, which is very much not winning. Then I tried 1… Rxb2 2 d7 Rd2 3 Ke7 Kg7 4 d8=Q Rxd8 5 Kxd8 Kf6 6 Kd7 Ke5 7 Kc6 Kd4 8 Kb5, which is not only not winning for black, but winning for white.
I wish I could say that I calculated these two lines clearly and quickly, but I spent a lot of time trying to poke holes in them and got rather frustrated. OK, I decided by process of elimination (helpful earlier but not so now) that it had to be a check. 1… Rh6+ 2 Ke7 seemed silly, so I decided on 1… Re2+ with the following variation as proof of concept: 2 Kd5 Kf7 3 Kxc5 Ke6 4 Kc6 Rxb2 5 c5 Rd2 6 Kc7 Rd31 7 Kc6 Rd5 8 Kb6 Kd7 and black wins. Sadly, I missed 1… Re2+ 2 Kf6! Kf8 3 d7 Rd2 4 Ke6 with the same kind of drawing setup as in the first variation: white will break with b4 and queen right after black does.
The winning variation required a combination of ideas: 1… Kf8! 2 d7 Rh6+! 3 Kd5 Ke7, driving away the white king from its support of the d-pawn. It’s a good reminder that the correct solution might require only two moves of good thinking rather than seven or eight.
Conclusions
The Bad: I’m pretty rusty. It took me a long time to see some pretty obvious ideas, and I hallucinated some lines that didn’t exist in the second problem. Despite the long term work I’ve put in to fixing my endgame woes, I still struggle in positions where finding a precise variation is required.
The Good: Most of the variations I calculated were accurate. I avoided jumping to conclusions, even when I wanted to blunder my queen in the first problem or unsoundly sacrifice a rook in the fourth. Even when it took a while, I eventually settled on the right idea in all four of the middlegame positions.
I’ll report back with a similar post after I’ve tracked my progress for a month to see if there’s any improvement. Stay tuned for some posts in the meanwhile about the other prep I’ll be doing strategic, endgame, and of course, opening prep.
Apparently this actually throws the win away; the tablebase says that 6… Ra2 is the only winning move and suggests that black could ease his task by playing 5… Rc2! on the previous move.