Tactical patterns, distractions and – who took my fork?
Beginning to see tactical patterns and
Holt – Nakamura, US Championship 2015, 0-1
Again, two themes for our evening. This time we’ll look at some tactical patterns and a ‘bold attack’ that relies on stacking threats one on top of another. Both themes rely on the knight’s odd moves.
In our first lecture we saw two patterns: Stonewall pawns and back rank weakness. It’s worth note that each pattern we see is worth further study! Last week’s simple example of back rank weakness was *not* the first ‘back rank’ thing you are told when you learn (row of pawns on the second rank and the king has nowhere to run). In our study game, the attacking knight *forced* the back row to become weak and *then* Magnus was able to win.
Playing an experienced club player means they are on the lookout for such ‘buried’ patterns – both for attack and defense – long before the beginner considers his next moves!
Naturally the first step is to learn the patterns that will be ‘buried’ (hard to see), then figure out how to recognize them before they are ‘ripe’. Here is our first for this week:
The Queen’s Duel
This pattern employs the power of a double attack, one on the opponent’s unprotected queen and one against something else. In the first diagram, the great tactician and world champion Mikhail Tal does NOT step into this trap – he neatly sidestepped it. But would you have seen this horrible problem coming your way? In this diagram we see what could have happened:
The attack of one queen on the other is exposed when white’s knight leaps into d5. One reason this is hard to see is that we intuitively think our opponent wouldn’t be ‘crazy’ enough to put his knight where our lowly pawn would ‘just’ take his piece. But now that you know the pattern, you can train yourself to consider such ‘odd’ moves all the time!
This next example shows just how complex such a simple pattern might become – and not always for the good! Sometimes you must not just see the basic pattern, but what happens next. Here, the champions also avoided the ‘trap’. In this case, if white had tried the Queen’s Duel, he would have lost! Jump to move 17 and see the notes:
Notice that after the ‘successful’ maneuver, white’s knight is left stranded in enemy territory. At first you might think the knight can leave the way it came in and keep a pawn. But Kasparov has seen even further and knows he has nothing to fear. In the end, the e4 pawn supporting the knight’s retreat is pinned along the e-file. When the knight is forcibly traded, another piece is lost on e2. Instead of winning a pawn, the Queen’s Duel has cost a piece for a single pawn!
So, this simple pattern was underneath both of these top level games, lurking just below the surface. In one case the pattern would have won and in the other using it would have lost!
And now our game for the day: Nakamura gins up a huge mating attack, seemingly from thin air!
I’ve started the game with this position for the first tactical pattern. Many beginners learn early on the power of the knight to fork – often first with check on QB2, hitting the king and the queen’s rook. And here, white respected the threat, moving his king away to f1, to no avail.
‘Who took my fork?’ cries the knight, as black forges ahead with a series of deadly threats:
Notice the first added pattern threatening white’s queen rook even without the fork. It relies on the white squared diagonal ending on b1, which is where black has posted his queen. When the knight moves to c2 white must save the rook by moving it to b1, the only available square. If the knight then leaves with another threat, the b1 square will be exposed again along the h7 – b1 diagonal. In this game the white knight on c3 is indeed removed, so this pattern could have happened.
Our lesson at this point is to notice the things that might happen and be ready to use them!
But in this game, even that secondary idea is only used as the basis for another threat. And another – and another. When the knight finally does get to c2 – it doesn’t even want the rook!
The final, bigger threat nets the white king instead. The beleaguered Conrad Holt (a powerful grandmaster, too!) is overwhelmed by the avalanche of threats and loses his way. The errant black queen’s knight has maneuvered in for the kill all the way from b8, ‘paying it’s way’ with one threat after another.
Here’s the whole game, with notes by Nakamura.