GCAA Chess 9/30

We had another successful practice tonight, and it's great to see newcomers enjoying the great game!

The theme of today's practice was attacking chess, and we discussed some of the requirements and characteristics of typical attacks.

1. The attacker must have sufficient material to complete the attack. One or even two pieces rarely are enough to complete a kingside attack!
2. Pawn storms (using direct advances of pawns on the castled position) are common way to open lines to the king.
3. When the two sides castle in opposite directions, both sides have the option to pawn storm.

Therefore, we went over a famous game featuring Bobby Fischer.

Fischer-Larsen 1958

This site is a great resource of thousands of games for review. Most do not have much annotation, but you can play over almost any famous game ever on that site.

The following is one of my favorite games of all time which we may or may not get a chance to review later in practice.

TW Barnes - Morphy

We also discussed the following types of players:

Rabbits - jump from idea to idea, react to the opponent more often than they create the action.

Hornets - constantly making threats, though few are truly deadly. Rarely pays much attention to defense. However, sometimes gets lucky as the opponent is constantly on their heels. 

Kingslayer - obsessed with going after the king. Loves to attack, sometimes neglects defense. In order to be successful, must be very good at tactics and calculation.

Stonemason - loves to create a fortress, pick off a few pawns, and wear down the opponent to a winning endgame. Must be very good at positional chess and defense to survive other player’s attacks. Often extremely hard to beat.

Serpent - slowly coils around the opponent but very happy to strike when the opportunity arises. Requires first a good positional sense but also good tactics. However, does not require deep, genius level knowledge of either.


I personally think the Serpent style is a goal for all students, but there have been Grandmasters with all of the bottom 3 styles. However, one of the easiest clues for me that someone is less experiences is when that person plays in the rabbit or hornet style. 


Homework sheet this week is Knight Mazes.