The Chess Mind

Contemporary chess is characterized by concrete, dynamic play. Material is sacrificed, weaknesses are accepted, and pieces move to all sorts of peculiar squares – as long as it works! Nevertheless, we sometimes need to be reminded that (as Freud might say) a weakness is just a weakness.

Our game this week is a perfect illustration of this thesis. In the game Najdorf-Averbakh, from the famous 1953 Neuhausen/Zurich Candidates Tournament, White accepted a doubled c-pawn for a smidgen of space and a dash of activity. The pawns were safe enough – they weren’t under attack, the c-file was closed and they could be easily defended in any case – and so it seemed to White like a reasonable bargain.

In fact, there really wasn’t anything wrong with Najdorf’s choice, but that doesn’t mean his decision to accept doubled pawns was risk-free. He was risking one sort of disadvantage for compensation, and the danger is that the compensation will dry up. That’s what happened here, and Averbakh – more on him below – demonstrated the under-appreciated rule of thumb that doubled pawns are a double weakness. Not only are the pawns themselves weak, but very often the square of the leading pawn is weak as well (c4 in this game, most typical of Nimzo-Indian structures). Black pressured the pawn – and although White was able to save the pawn by playing c5 followed by cxb6, that still didn’t fix the problem of the weak square, and allowed Black to enjoy even more pressure with …cxb6! followed by mayhem on the c-file.

Averbakh, who won this game convincingly, was one of the greatest players of the 1950s. He made it to the 1953 Candidates, won one Soviet Championship (1954) and tied for first in another (1956), and is one of the relatively few players known both for his opening and endgame contributions. On February 8 of this year, he turned 85, so we’ll take this opportunity to celebrate his birthday and commemorate his chess.

See you this Thursday! (9 pm ET; directions for watching can be found here.)

Is the Advance Variation against the Caro-Kann (1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.e5) an attacking system? It is on many of its most popular interpretations (e.g. 3…Bf5 4.Nc3 e6 5.g4), but in the early 1990s British GM and 1993 World Championship finalist Nigel Short devised a slower system (4.Nf3 e6 5.Be2 followed by O-O, c3 and Be3 in some order). You might expect that since this week’s game, Short-Ljubojevic, Amsterdam 1991, demonstrates that variation in action, the play will be comparatively quiet. And you’d be right…up to a point.

The play starts with relative quiet, as both sides develop in peace, fix the pawn structures and start to build for play on opposite sides of the board. But the fireworks do come, and when they do, the results are impressive! What’s especially unusual about the game is the interplay between unexpected violent moves and even more unexpected quiet moves. The overall effect is powerful, yet despite the virtuoso nature of Short’s performance, I think those of us who play the Advance Caro-Kann, the Advance French, or the King’s Indian Attack can learn a thing or two for our own games.

Hope to see you there – same time as always, Thursday night at 9 pm ET. (If you've never seen the show before, you can find directions for watching it - free - here.)

1.e4 players, are you tired of facing the stodgy Caro-Kann? And more generally, chess fans, are you tired of GM computer preparation? To both groups I say, fear not: the game Baadur Jobava – Evgeny Bareev from the 2003 European Club Cup is for you. In the Classical Main Line of the Caro-Kann, the players reached this position after move 14:



It’s a typically dry, technical position (not that anything is wrong with technical positions, but we’ll return to them another week), and you can run your chess software until you turn deep blue in the face, but all you’ll get are moves like 15.c4 and 15.dxc5. Jobava, a talented youngster from Georgia, had a different idea: 15.d5!!? Don’t get the point? Don’t worry, Bareev didn’t either (or more likely he did, but underestimated the strength of White’s attack), and lost an inspired game. First Jobava played for mate with queens on, then found a brilliant way to play for mate with the queens off, and then tiptoed through some landmines to escape Bareev’s desperate counterattack.

It’s a beautiful, complete game, and one I’m sure you’ll enjoy when you tune in this Thursday night at 9 pm ET on the playchess server. Hope to see you then!

(If you're unfamiliar with the playchess server, you can find directions for watching the show, here.)

Former world champion Boris Spassky celebrated his 70th birthday on Tuesday, and we'll take this occasion to celebrate his chess. Although he had a reputation as a "universal" player, I think it's fair to say that his most natural skill was in attack.

Accordingly, we'll take a look at two such outstanding efforts from late in his career. First, we'll examine a 1977 match win against Dutch great Jan Timman. Timman played the Gruenfeld, and the traditional race occurred between White's attacking prospects based on central control and Black's efforts to explode that center. On this occasion, of course, it was Black's position that did the exploding.

Likewise, our second game featured Yasser Seirawan punting another counter-attacking opening, the Pirc, in their game from Zurich 1984. Once again, the guerilla warfare approach failed, and Spassky won with a fine kingside attack that gives the impression of having been primarily intuitive.

So if you want a few tips on attacking, want to improve your knowledge of one of the game’s greatest players, or simply want to see a pair of exciting, entertaining games, I hope you’ll join me tonight, Thursday night, at 9 pm ET. See you then! (Directions for watching the show can be found here.)