During the last few weeks we have been learning basic tactics. In this post I’m going to change the pace a bit and write a few words on topics that I believe are overlooked in competitive activities. Besides chess I have several other hobbies. Many of these are hobbies that I have dedicated myself to [Read more...]
Well, I hope you all had a great Christmas! and now that it is over and we move towards the new year I thought we could look at something else. We covered a lot of material in the previous six posts. Now it’s time to put that knowledge to practice. The first five are relatively [Read more...]
In this post of the tactics series I’ll discuss X-rays and windmills. Despite their descriptive names, these two tactics are relatively rare. Let me say if you succeed in trapping your opponent in a windmill you can win his entire army! The X-ray tactic occurs when a piece ‘sees through’ an enemy piece towards a [Read more...]
In my opinion these two tactics are overlooked and not studied in enough detail. Imagine that you’re in the middle of a tough chess match. You notice that you can make a strong capture or check, unfortunately however one of your own pieces is in the way. That’s where a clearance sacrifice comes into play. [Read more...]
As Christmas gets nearer, I thought we should continue with our series covering basic tactics. First let’s just do some quick definitions so we can get a basic understanding of these two tactics. Deflection is exactly what you would think. An enemy piece is guarding an important square or piece. If we can find a [Read more...]
In my last post I discussed discovered attacks. Technically, discovered attacks and discovered checks are forms of double attacks. I decided to do two separate postings because this tactic is so common and important. Learning the exact terminology isn’t the goal here, what’s important is recognizing the patterns and being able to incorporate them into [Read more...]