Here's another game from last month's ICA Girls' Invitational Championship at the North Shore Chess Center. I hope that both Adele and Miranda will forgive me for publishing a game in which they made 51 good moves and only one bad one. But I found this game so instructive because it's so typical.
The stylish way to win a game is by direct attack against the enemy king. In real life, we don't get to be stylish as often as we'd like. So we win a piece instead. When we talk about "winning a piece" in chess, we mean winning a bishop or a knight, worth about three pawns. In this game, Miranda wins a piece for a pawn: in quiet middlegame positions, this advantage is usually sufficient for a win.
When you win a piece for a pawn, what's the easiest way to win? Well, you'd like to use your extra material to queen a pawn and then checkmate with overwhelming force.
But put yourself in your worthy opponent's shoes. You may be winning, but you have one less pawn than she does. So if the defender could keep trading one of her pawns for one of your pawns until there was only one pawn left, that extra pawn would be hers. True, you would still be up a piece, but you'd have to look for a way to checkmate without making a queen. That's much harder! (Rule of thumb: in pawnless endings, one often has to be up by five "points" to win.)
DEFENDERS WANT TO TRADE PAWNS, NOT PIECES. (Here, we use "pieces" in a second sense: kings, queens, rooks, bishops, and knights, but not pawns. Yes, I know we can't trade kings. And yes, we usually talk about chess sets having thirty-two pieces, not sixteen pieces and sixteen pawns: this third meaning of "piece" is actually the most common one.)
THE SUPERIOR SIDE WANTS TO TRADE PIECES, NOT PAWNS. Every pawn is a potential queen. Guard your potential queens just as you do the one that's already on the board!
The stylish way to win a game is by direct attack against the enemy king. In real life, we don't get to be stylish as often as we'd like. So we win a piece instead. When we talk about "winning a piece" in chess, we mean winning a bishop or a knight, worth about three pawns. In this game, Miranda wins a piece for a pawn: in quiet middlegame positions, this advantage is usually sufficient for a win.
When you win a piece for a pawn, what's the easiest way to win? Well, you'd like to use your extra material to queen a pawn and then checkmate with overwhelming force.
But put yourself in your worthy opponent's shoes. You may be winning, but you have one less pawn than she does. So if the defender could keep trading one of her pawns for one of your pawns until there was only one pawn left, that extra pawn would be hers. True, you would still be up a piece, but you'd have to look for a way to checkmate without making a queen. That's much harder! (Rule of thumb: in pawnless endings, one often has to be up by five "points" to win.)
DEFENDERS WANT TO TRADE PAWNS, NOT PIECES. (Here, we use "pieces" in a second sense: kings, queens, rooks, bishops, and knights, but not pawns. Yes, I know we can't trade kings. And yes, we usually talk about chess sets having thirty-two pieces, not sixteen pieces and sixteen pawns: this third meaning of "piece" is actually the most common one.)
THE SUPERIOR SIDE WANTS TO TRADE PIECES, NOT PAWNS. Every pawn is a potential queen. Guard your potential queens just as you do the one that's already on the board!
Adele Padgett – Miranda
Liu [D45]
ICA Girls’ Invitational
March 31, 2012
1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Nf3 Be7 5.e3 0–0
6.Be2 c6 7.0–0 Nbd7 8.Bd2 dxc4 9.Bxc4 b5
 |
| White to play |
Miranda chooses a Meran Variation setup. As
White's bishop is not that active on d2, Black should get nice play.
10.Bd3 Bb7 11.e4 a6 12.Rc1 c5
 |
| White to play |
The typical Meran break.
