Monday, September 29, 2008

Open Files and Pins

Tactics without strategy is like having the awesome firepower of an artillery battery, but nobody to spot and direct fire at key enemy targets.



An artillery gun and its operators by themselves are dangerous. They may score the occasional decisive shot--and yet their true potential is revealed only when they work with a spotter. This team is worth far more than the sum of its parts.

This brings us to a recent rapid game, where I successfully combined open files (strategy) and pins (tactics) with a smashing result! I was excited to see the one-two punch of hitting the tactics and studying My System pay off so clearly in an actual game.   :)



Black to move and win. Can you spot White's best defense and Black's winning line?

game-file-pin.pgn

8 comments:

Chessaholic said...

Very nice! It's fun to see such a clear display of basic principles at work :)

Anonymous said...

I dont understand whites move h4. Opponent must have missed the knightfork on rook and king.

Anyway, nice technique afterwards with finishing your opp off.

likesforests said...

chessaholic - Yup, it's nice to feel like I'm learning something!

chesstiger - Yup, 21.h4 ceded the exchange and a pawn. The neat thing is, even if he had seen the proper defense (21.Re2), I would still have won a pawn by force. :)

Dennis said...

I really enjoy going over commented games from people who aren't rated 2500+. I guess it's because I don't feel totally stupid when trying to follow them. Nice game, I enjoyed it.

Ivan said...

Hello likesforests,

Thanks for visiting. Too bad about chessloser, have you heard from him since?

When is your next tournament?

Getting to 2000

Anonymous said...

Did you play in the Exchange Bank Fall Classic G/60 in Santa Rosa, CA on September 27th?

likesforests said...

Knightfork, glad you enjoyed. :)

Ivan, I'm glad he seems to be making the best of a bad situation. I don't know when my next tournament will be. I'll be logging overtime at my office until mid October.

anon, I skipped it.

jsobo119 said...

Nice! I spotted the weakness of the white e-pawn after some scouting. For some reason I decided the knight had to find an active home. I actually didn't consider anything else? Then I was trying to figure out what good would putting the knight on d4 would do... and decided that was fruitless. It was then that I saw the weakness of the e-pawn. I looked at Nc4 and decided that it would win a pawn.

I never even considered Ng5! DUH! and upon further reflection I didn't consider Nc5 Qf3 ... oh for fun I just plugged the position into fritz 8 and it suggested Qc2 as a response to Nc5.

I think this is where playing blitz has shortened my thinking process to a fault.

If I find a good move I need to look for a better one... or at least make sure my line IS forcing and their best reply isn't worse for me...

Thanks for the nice post...