Before we start with a new lesson about the pin we are going to repeat the four things that we have learned about the pin in our previous lessons:

1. Remember the difference between an absolute and a relative pin.

		An absolute pin  Black is not allowed to move the knight on c6.
		A relative pin Black is allowed to move the knight, but then (in this case) White will capture the queen. See also the lesson about the pin.

2. The simple pin

Winning a piece  White is able to pin the knight by 32.Rd1 and can capture this knight on the next move 33.Rxd4+.

3. Attacking a pinned piece

In the diagram on the left White is able to pin the piece, but this piece can be defended by the b-pawn. White is still able to capture this piece, because he is able to attack the piece: 27.Bb4 b6 28.d4 Kg7 29.dxc5 See Attacking a pinned piece

4. A pinned piece isn’t a real defender

The knight is pinned. This allows White to capture the rook: 26.Qxb7 See the A pinned piece cannot be counted as a defender lesson

Next we are going to pay some attention to Chess Tactics explained.

The evergreen game is (like the immortal game) another famous chess game from Adolf Anderssen. The game was played against Jean Dufresne in 1852 and can also be found in the ICOFY database that we have used during one of our previous lessons. The name evergreen means something like “Forever Young”.
The whole game can be replayed below, but I think that the most interesting part of the game are the last moves starting from the position in the diagram below.



This is a mate in four exercise. Can you solve it, or do you have to look at the full game?
The mating pattern is rather nice. Are you already familiar with the Immortal Game or do you want to proceed with revisiting the Pin.

Let’s have a look at the next diagram taken from a real game played in 2007. It is White’s turn to move.

   

Before reading further try to figure this out by yourself.

Looking at the candidate move 9.Nxe5 we have to conclude that we only have gained a pawn. The king is defending f7. This prevents the knight fork 10.Nxf7 attacking both the queen as well as the rook. More important: It is now Black’s turn to move and he can prevent our plan by playing 9…Qxd1.

Let’s have a look at the candidate move 9.Qxd8+. This move has to be followed by 9…Kxd8. After 10.Nxe5 it seems that Black is still able to defend f7 by 10…Be6, but after 11.Bxe6 fxe6 we can play a succesfull 12.Nf7+.
After 10…Ke8 the line 11.Nxf7 Rf8 12.Ng5 is interesting, and we have to look at the possible knight fork at c7 after a move like Nb5.

Try to find this kind of combinations in your own games. If a combination doesn’t seem to work try to rearrange the order of the moves.

The next lesson is about the Evergreen Game.

Original 4 Responses on CTL to “Finding combinations”

1. 
   THOMAS
   November 23rd, 2009 at 5:28 pm
   Whats preventing the knight fork 10.Nxf7 when white has support from the c4 knight? Also how is 12.Nf7+ possible when the king never moved?
2. 
   Chess Teacher
   November 24th, 2009 at 10:29 am
   @THOMAS
   White has support from the c4 knight, but please keep in mind that Black is only allowed to do one move at the time. Please note that f7 can be defended by playing …Be6.
   The mentioned move 12.Nf7+ is possible because the king has moved (and had to move after 9.Qxd8+) 9…Kxd8. Now after 10.Nxe5 the move 10…Be6 doesn’t help anymore, because of 11.Bxe6 fxe6 12.Nf7+
3. 
   THOMAS
   November 24th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
   I concur.Excellent website dude.
4. 
   THOMAS
   November 24th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
   Of course I concur. Excellent Website.

In addition to the smothered mate, in which the mated king is unable to move because all the surrounding squares are occupied by his own pieces, there are a lot of mating patterns in which the king is only partly smothered by his own pieces.

Let’s have a look at the next diagram and try to figure out how to exploit that Black’s king is almost smothered.



The solution is visible by selecting the text between the two brackets.

[ 1. Rh4+ gxh4 2. g4# ]

Remember that if you succeed in taking away all the surrounding squares of your opponent’s king a simple check will be sufficient to win the game. Taking away these squares can be done by attacking these squares or by forcing your opponent to place his pieces on these squares.

The next chess lesson is about finding combinations.

---

Original 3 responses to “Smothering the King”

1. 
   Arthur Marquis
   October 7th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
   Sorry I am just learning annotation, but I was curious about your solution….
   Why not
   white pawn to g4 forcing the king to h4 then bring white queen to h2 on the diagonal? same amount of moves
2. 
   Chess Teacher
   October 8th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
   There is no white queen on the board. The queen on c7 is a black queen.
   I think that I have to replace the Leipzig chess set by another one.
3. 
   Chess Teacher
   October 8th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
   I am now using the Alpha chess set.

The immortal game is one of the most famous games ever played. It was played in 1851 as an informal game between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky.

According to Wikipedia:

Played between the two great players at the Simpson’s-in-the-Strand Divan in London, the immortal game was an informal one played during a break in a formal tournament. Kieseritzky was very impressed when the game was over, and telegraphed the moves of the game to his Parisian chess club. The French chess magazine La Régence published the game in July 1851. This game was later nicknamed “The Immortal Game” in 1855 by the Austrian Ernst Falkbeer.

As you can see in the figure above the game is so famous that the position after the 20th move is used as an illustration on this 1984 stamp from Suriname.

The Wikipedia article is fully annotated, but it may be a nice exercise if you first annotate the game yourselves, since the game contains a lot of nice combinations. If you are not familiar with this opening have a look at the lesson about the King’s Gambit.


The next lesson is about Smothering the King, but you may also be interested in the Evergreen Game.

In this lesson I will show you the Mortimer trap, also known as the Mortimer Variation of the Berlin Defense.
The next lesson is about the Immortal Game, but you may also be interested in the previous lesson about the Kieninger Trap.

---

The Budapest Defence is a chess opening that starts with the moves 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e5. This is one of the rare gambit lines for Black, because almost all of the gambit lines are for White. It is rarely played at grandmaster level, but for the amateur it may be a nice way to immediately attack White’s centre. During most games the sacrificed pawn will be given back, because the alternatives are giving Black a nice advantage in the development of his pieces.

In this lesson we will focus on showing the Kieninger trap, which is one of the reasons to play the Budapest gambit at all. In addition the most important variations of the Budapest gambit are shown.
Liked this game? You will probably like the Immortal Game even more, but first we will have a look at the Mortimer Trap.

Google Plus automatically created the folowing animated gif, based on the images of the previous post.

A passed pawn is a pawn that can not be stopped anymore by one of the opposing pawns. A passed pawn is rather valuable especially in the endgame. Passed pawns are dangerous and they have to be stopped. Assuming that the pawn can not be captured we can stop them by:

• attacking the square in front of the pawn
• or placing a piece in front of the pawn

The player with the passed pawn will try to use all the tactical weapons to eliminate the piece that prevents the pawn to queen.
But this will be something of a future lesson. Now we are going to create a passed pawn.

The diagrams below illustrate a rather famous example about the creation of a passed pawn.

		At first sight the position looks about even, but White’s pawns are allready on the fifth rank.
		1.g6 White is going to sacrifice a pawn.
		1…hxg6 Black has to capture the pawn. 1…fxg6 is an alternative
		2.f6 and White is going to sacrifice the second pawn
		2…gxf6 Black has nothing to chose
		3.h6 and now White has created a passed pawn. This will be sufficient to win the game.

The next lesson of these series will learn you the Kieninger trap.

This is an old, but very illustrative game that shows how to take care of a development advantage and some mistakes of your opponent.

In the next lesson we are going to create a passed pawn.

Deflection is a tactic that forces a piece of your opponent to leave the square, row or file where it has to remain, because it is needed there to defend something. This chess term is rather similar to luring, but in luring a piece has to be positioned at the right square to enable an attack while in deflection there is a (double) attack, but the defender has to be moved away in order to be successful.
Trying to promote can be seen as a kind of attack.

The following diagram is a nice example of deflection.



White threatens to promote the pawn, but then Black’s rook will capture the queened piece. Even worse: Black is also threatening to capture the pawn.
Happily for White he is able to play 53. Rg5 which prevents that the pawn can be captured (An absolute pin) and Blacks best move will be 53…Rxg5 after which Black will be able to promote 54. d8=Q.

If Black reacts to 53.Rg5 with the move 53…Kc6 then the next moves are 54.Rxd5 Kxd5 55.d8=Q+ wih an easy win for White (See mating with the queen).

In the next lesson we are going to storm the castle.

In one of the previous lessons we have learned about the double attack. But sometimes your opponent will be not so cooperative that he is positioning his pieces in such a way that you are able to attack two pieces at the same time.

With a supporting Knight on c7, d6, f6 or g7 instead of on g4 White should be able to make a successful double attack with the move Re8+. While looking at the position of this diagram and realizing that White is also able to attack both the King and the Queen at the same time if the Queen can be lured to e8 it becomes rather clear what’s the right move for White.

Like the double attack can be seen as a capture in two, this kind of luring can be seen as a double attack in two.

During the previous lessons we have created some opening reports as well as an opening analysis of the Lolli attack. We have done this while learning how to use a chess database in general and ChessDB in particular. But by creating this opening analysis we are looking for the good games, in fact almost always ignoring the bad games. And these games contain a lot of chess lessons to be learned, especially when these are you own games. But even when you know the right moves it has to be interesting to know why. In other words to know why the other moves are bad.

For example when we look at the opening report of the Lolli attack we notice that Black succeeded in winning eight of the games and by now we now that White must have done something wrong during these games.

The exercise of this lesson is to figure out why White lost the game for each of these eight games.

As an example I have added some annotations to one of these games (the game Jacko, Tomas – Smistik, Milan) leaving you with seven games to annotate by yourself.


Next chess lesson is about Luring.

This lesson has been published before on chessteacherlessons.com, but has been added by the original author to this site after the domain name has expired.

This purpose of this post is to show you the result of the opening’s analysis of our previous lesson. This is one of the reasons that all the moves are taken from the ICOfY database instead of my own database.

The result is an Opening analysis of the Lolli Attack.

You can compare it with the opening report that we have created before, with the most exhaustive analysis of this opening on the Web by Michael Goeller on his very nice looking website and with the analysis that you have done by yourselves.

I suppose that the best method will be to generate your own lesson based on for example the ICOfY database and add your own comments to it. This time I didn’t add any personal, other people’s or general knowledge about this opening to the post, because the main purpose is to show how you can make your own analysis (probably even for another opening).

As we have seen in the automatically generated opening report there are at least 14 move orders reaching the position after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 4.Ng5 d5 5.exd5 Nxd5 6.d4 exd4 7.O-O and Black has least eleven alternatives to continue, but only two of them are frequently played and I will limit myself to the three most important ones in this post, but feel free to add the missing continuations to your own chess material. Adding them to this post will make the post more dificult to read. Maybe even now the post is rather difficult to read, because of the fact that I show an example game for each continuation.

Original Response to “The Lolli Attack”

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

1. 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 White Repertoire Webliography | The Kenilworthian

As you have seen in one of the previous posts one of the most important steps in writing an opening analysis is to select some of the most representative games. But instead of merging the into one game you can also load the games and copy them to the clipboard enabling you to add them to your database of representative opening lines.

Doing this with the ten selected games of the previous lesson results in the following opening report from ChessDB.



You can see that two games seem to have disappeared. This is caused by the fact that the selected opening position doesn’t occur in two of these games.
When comparing all these opening reports and analysis you will see that trying to write a good analysis has everything to do with trying to find a balance between adding enough details without losing the overview.

Now we know how to play this opening we continue with a lesson about how not to play this opening.

In this chess lesson we are going to combine some of the knowledge of the key squares, the square rule and the square rule for two separated pawns. First have look at the diagram on the left site. It’s a draw. Can you see why? And do you see that the game is won by White if the black pawns are removed from the board?

Both White as well as Black didn’t have other options.


The next lesson is about the usefulness of a chess database.

The third rank defense is the most important defense in the king and rook versus king, rook and pawn endgame. A lot of people refer to it as the Philidor position, but this name is also used for some other endgame positions.

There is already a lot of information about this position available on the internet, for example in the Philidor position on Wikipedia and I will limit this post to some additional information which probably helps to really understand this position.

First of all it is important to understand that the weaker side strives to capture the pawn or to exchange the rooks while being in a position that the pawn can be stopped. Therefor it is needed to be familiar with the single pawn endgame and the key squares. However the most important part of this endgame is creating a possibility to start a never ending king hunt by the defending rook which also results in a draw.

The third (or sixth) rank defense can be summarized as:

• The black rook is keeping the white king away from the sixth rank.
• As soon as the pawn moves to the sixth rank the defending rook has to be moved back
• starting a kind of king hunt with distant checks

An illustrative example:

The following game between Tarrash and Allies (Naples, 1914) is one of the most famous and illustrative examples of interfering.

In the next chess lesson we will start with the Scotch Gambit.

In one of the previous lessons 4 possibilities to eliminate the defender have been shown:

• Capturing
• Attacking
• Interference
• Distracting

This chess lesson will be focussed on Interference, also known as blocking the defender. The general idea is to block the line between the defender and the piece or square it is trying to defend.

		An illustrative example of this tactical motif is shown in the diagram on the left. The white Rook is attacking the black Knight, but this Knight is defended by the black Rook. By playing 1.d4+ the protection is removed and the Knight can be captured 2.Rxh4. Please note that it is only possible to block a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line. It will be impossible to block a defending Knight, pawn or King.
		Let’s have a look at the next diagram. It’s Black’s turn to move. No pieces are attacked, but White’s Queen is an important defender. Without this Queen it was a mate in one. Black can block this defender by 1. …Ra5+, and White has to play 2. Qxa5 to prevent the mate, but also makes that his Queen will be captured 2…bxa5. The mate can not be avoided 3. Kb1 Bg6+ 4. Rc2 Qf1+ 5. Ka2 Bxc2 6. Be1 Qxe1 7. d5 Qb1+ 8. Ka3 Qa1#. A nice example of interference, showing that we have to consider more targets than the attacked pieces.
		This third diagram gives another example. It is White’s turn to move. White has a kind of double attack by means of a queen fork, but each of the rooks is defending the other one. The move 1. d6 blocks this line and Black will be unable to bring both rooks to safety at the same time. Black’s best move is probably 1…Raxd6, but then White will continue with 2.exd6. This example illustrates that it is not necessary for the inferfering piece to attack anything at all.
		I will leave the solution of this last exercise to you. It is White’s turn to move. You are invited to add the solution to the comments. To give a clue: It is a combination of a discovered attack and interference.

The next lesson is a nice example game of interfering: Tarrasch - Allies (1914).

Original 6 Responses on CTL to “Interfering”

1. 
   genius
   November 12th, 2007 at 12:58 am
   1. Bh7 Qxe2
   2. Bxh6++
2. 
   Chess Teacher
   November 13th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
   @genius
   OK, but I don’t think that Black is going to play 1…Qxe2, but probably 1…Rxh7
3. 
   Azizul
   February 15th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
   It is obvious! 1.Nxf7 and White wins.
4. 
   Chess Teacher
   February 16th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
   @Azizul
   Sorry, but it isn’t that obvious
   1.Nxf7 gives away the advantage
   it will probably be followed by 1…d3 2.Qxd3 Kxf7
   You have to look for a combination of a discovered attack and interference to find the right move.
5. 
   JUAN MAREGO
   March 6th, 2010 at 2:34 am
   1. Bh7 Rxh7,2. Qxb2
   (1. ..Qxe2,2. Bxh6++
6. 
   Chess Teacher
   March 6th, 2010 at 10:26 am
   Yes

This is the first chess lesson of the third part of the series of chess lessons at intermediate level. In the future I will add more chess lessons to the previous parts, but I think it is time to move on to the next level.

The King’s Gambit is one of the most famous gambits. The purpose of this pawn sacrifice is to get an piece development advantage. In fact this is the general compensation for the sacrificed pawn in a gambit.
When you start playing the King’s Gambit you have to be familiar with the key concepts: the fast piece development, the strong pawn center, the (half)open f-line and the attack on f7, all in exchange for the sacrificed pawn on f4. Despite all of these compensations Black can obtain a reasonable position by giving back the extra pawn at a later time and consolidating defensively.
This is one of the main reasons that the King’s Gambit is rarely seen at the master level. On the other hand I think that every chess player has to play some gambits during some time. This contributes to a better understanding of the chess game and gives a feeling about the value of things like piece development. In addition the games are very sharp and interesting, and increase the fun in playing chess games.

In this chess lesson I will limit myself to indicate the most important variations of the King’s gambit. In general the variation ends at the point where the pawn has been recaptured. Black’s largest mistake is to hold onto the pawn at all costs.

In the King’s Gambit White tries to get control about the centre and to increase the pressure on black’s pawn on f7, his greatest weakness. The white Bishop often moves to c4, attacking f7. The Knight on the king’s side is moved to f3 and later on to g5 or e5, also attacking f7. After White playing O-O and opening the f-file White’s Rook is targeted at Black’s weakest square.
As mentioned before this overview is far from complete, but gives an overview of the most important variations. The advantage of this compact representation is that it is probably easier to understand and comprehend. The next chess lesson is about the third rank defense followed by the game Kasparov - Georgiev, 1988.

Original 2 Responses on CTL to “King’s Gambit”

1. 
   harcee sarmiento
   January 9th, 2009 at 5:45 am
   i am an avid fan of the kings gambit accepted and one of the Novelty i am using right now which comes to success is 1.e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. h4!? i am looking for more new theory about it so please give me more new lines on the kings gambit.
2. 
   Chess Teacher
   January 9th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
   1.e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. h4 is the Leonardo Gambit.
   I will later add some information about this gambit on this site.
   Eric Schiller also pays some attention to this gambit in “Unorthodox Chess Openings”.
   One of the oldest examples of this gambit can be found on the net in theEarliest Chess Games by Bill Wall.