Coffeehouse nuggets
I have a few nuggets that I remember from today's trip to the coffeehouse.The first position arises from a French defense. I don't usually play 1. e4, but decided what the heck, I'll play it today. I thought we were in an interminable positional struggle where my opponent had a bad bishop and couldn't really break my position. I have good knights, but I don't really see what targets they can hit.
White to move
The knight on f4 holds my kingside and influences the center. I'm planning to play on the c-file and try to get my other knight to d6 or c5, though I'm not even sure what my targets are from there. All that becomes moot when my opponent drops Rhd8 in my lap.
In the next example, I think I was very close to getting run over in an opposite side castling game. I caught a break when my opponent overlooked my only tactical chance.
Black to move
(I just realized, the king should be on c8, not b8 -- will fix the diagram later)
This one obviously takes some deeper calculation, but I've been thinking about the first move of this combination for most of the game so a lot of the lines seemed to come naturally. For a Temposchlucker plan beta hint -- the first invasion square is f2, the second invasion square is h3.
The game continued 1. ... Ng4+ 2. Kg1 Bxf2+ 3. Kh1 h4 4. Be3 hxg3 5. b5 Qh5 6. Bxf2 Nxf2+ 6. Rxf2 Rxf2 7. Nxd6+ Kd7 8. Nxb7 Rxg2 9. bxc6+ Ke7 10. Qa3+Ke8 11. Kxg2 Qxh3+ 12. Kf3 Qf5+ White resigns.
I believe there are improvements for both sides in that line, but I don't think there is a refutation of black's play. It's a real exercise to calculate all the possibilities and I certainly didn't do that over the board.
Ct-Art update, 94% on level 30. 178 problems done out of 221. Looks like I'm going to have a huge improvement on 86% three times in a row.
Update: Finished level 30, rep 4 today. 92%! Ok, I slipped up a bit at the end, but it's still a big deal to do this much better. I'll go back and review the last 20-30 problems of the level before I move on to level 40.
Labels: coffeehouse, diagrams, progress report, tactics
posted by Loomis @ 9:32 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Congrats on the improvement!I always have that 'near the end of the set' dip. If you do things in test mode you can redo all problems with errors until you get them all right. This has been really helpful for me.
94% level three. fantastic.
and love your elementally simple but no less powerfull use of diagrams here, so clean and uncluttered.
warmly, dk
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