First published in 2012 by Gloucester Publishers Limited, Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT Copyright © 2012 Matthew Sadler The right of Matthew Sadler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978 1 85744 940 2 Distributed in North America by The Globe Pequot Press, P.O Box 480, 246 Goose Lane, Guilford, CT 06437-0480. All other sales enquiries should be directed to Everyman Chess, Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT tel: 020 7253 7887 fax: 020 7490 3708 email: [email protected]; website: www.everymanchess.com Everyman is the registered trade mark of Random House Inc. and is used in this work under licence from Random House Inc. Everyman Chess Series Chief advisor: Byron Jacobs Commissioning editor: John Emms Assistant editor: Richard Palliser Typeset and edited by First Rank Publishing, Brighton. Cover design by Horatio Monteverde. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Discovering New Ideas in the Opening 2 Introducing New Ideas Easily into your Opening Repertory 3 Playing Unorthodox Openings 4 Types of Thinking in the Middlegame 5 That Didn’t Quite Work Out ... 6 Thinking in Endgames Index of Games Acknowledgments A huge thank you to Natasha Regan for all her suggestions, corrections and her unstinting enthusiasm during the writing of this book. I really don’t know where she found the time, but I’m so grateful she did – it wouldn’t have been quite the same book without her help. And as always, my heartfelt thanks to my parents for all their love and support over the years. I didn’t quite manage to accomplish everything I wanted to in chess, but I had a wonderful time trying ... and years later, chess is still one of the most rewarding things in my life. Nothing of that would have happened without them. Matthew Sadler, Netherlands, July 2012 Introduction Despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to escape chess. I decided to stop as a professional chess player just after the Tilburg Category 18 event of 1998, and after some months of job searching, I joined the ranks of the respectable working population on 1st October 1999 when I started work at the Hewlett-Packard helpdesk for mobile computers in Amsterdam. In the years that followed, I still played some chess for my Bundesliga club until 2003, but after that, apart from a yearly outing in the Dutch Team Championship for companies, I was chess-free! But things change in your life, and at some stage I got the urge to play chess again. More importantly for me, I got the urge to play well again. That was easier said than done. Even though I was still capable of playing decently, I was extremely inconsistent. I decided at some stage that I needed to relearn a few skills and think again about all the hard-earned knowledge I had won as a professional. It took me quite a while, but in the end I felt I had managed to get the most important things in my game working again. The thought that these skills and lessons might be useful and interesting to other amateurs as well was the inspiration for this book. In this book I try to explain the most important skills for success as a practical chess player, and how you can train and develop these skills. In a nutshell, these skills are: a) How to find new ideas in openings. b) How to adopt new openings confidently and quickly. c) The various ways of solving practical middlegame problems. d) How to think in the endgame. I suppose you could call this book a collection of my personal ‘Eureka!’ experiences, those wonderful moments when something complicated suddenly feels as natural and as easy as breathing. Some of those insights needed a lot of hard work, and some only came after the sorrowful analysis of heart-rending defeats. Hopefully this book can spare you both the midnight oil and the traumas, and set you off on the right path from the very beginning! Chapter One Discovering New Ideas in the Opening The first thing I was confronted with when I started playing again was the state of my opening repertory. I still had plenty of unused analysis from my time as a professional, not of all of which was obsolete, so it seemed quite obvious to just play that again. At some stage I understood though that it wasn’t enough. The openings themselves were fine, but playing these openings game after game felt like going through the motions: ‘I played these 10 years ago, so I’ll play them now ... and in 50 years’ time.’ On the other hand, just playing a random opening without having any original thought about it is also a bit of a waste. I feel much more motivated and interested in a game if I have the feeling that I’m coming to the board with something new of my own. So what I needed was – as the Dutch saying goes – a sheep with five legs. I needed new openings I’d never seen/played before, I needed to have fresh new ideas in them (if not actual novelties, then something that felt new and exciting for me!) ... and I didn’t have much time to study either. Well I worked out how to put aside a few hours a week for opening study, so full of expectation I sat down in front of the board the first evening ... and felt completely blank. I switched on the computer, fired up ChessBase, downloaded the most recent TWIC games, picked a game at random, played it through, discovered the opening summary feature, started Rybka, gazed blankly while it evaluated the position as +0.03 ... and soon my two hours were gone. Lovely ... and this was supposed to be creative and fun? After a couple more evenings like that, I couldn’t take it anymore. My biggest problem seemed to be that I couldn’t generate any ideas. If I didn’t start up Rybka, I might stare at a position for hours without finding anything interesting. But ... I used to be really good at this. So what was I missing now? After pondering things for a while, I decided that I’d forgotten the difference between playing and analysing. When you play a game you invoke all sorts of filters/prejudices (consciously or unconsciously) to reduce the amount of information you have to process. Think of things like ‘I never play positions like that’, ‘Someone told me that you shouldn’t do that’, ‘I’ll never be able to calculate all that’, etc. This is useful in a practical situation as it speeds up your decision-making process, but these filters can get in the way of the creativity you need in analysis. The goal in (opening) analysis is not to limit the game and make it manageable. The goal is to discover new truths, and those truths may well lie outside the boundaries of your prejudices. My solution had three components: a) To remind myself explicitly before I started that I was analysing, not playing. I was going for creativity and quality, not expediency. b) I drew up a list of six ‘mind-enlarging’ approaches that I hoped would stimulate me to leave my comfort zone when analysing and trigger my creativity. c) I set the rule that I would only use Rybka to check analysis, not to generate ideas. In practice this meant that I followed this routine: 1) I set an alarm clock for 15 minutes. 2) Analysed for 2 x 15-minute stretches. 3) Typed my analysis into ChessBase (with Rybka switched off). Somehow writing things down always activates the checking part of my brain (I wish I was allowed to do that during games). 4) Then I switched on Rybka and checked through my analysis. I awarded myself points for the number of ideas I had analysed correctly. And what do points mean ... ? Pints! So you can see that a good analysis session tended to last shorter than a bad session. Well that’s enough explanation: let’s take a look at the themes: 1) Disturbing the material balance. 2) You can’t do that! Not in this opening! Well, actually ... 3) My goodness, you can play this for a win! 4) Crossover plans. 5) Acts of wanton aggression. 6) The spoilsport gambit (exchanging queens). Theme 1: Disturbing the material balance This theme speaks for itself. Don’t automatically shy away from lines where you might have to give something up. Be constantly aware that you can unbalance the material equilibrium in order to generate activity or create compensating weaknesses in the opponent’s position. The following example is a wonderfully subtle exposition of this theme. Game 1 A.Shirov-S.Mamedyarov Tal Memorial, Moscow 2010 Ruy Lopez 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 a6 4 Ba4 Nf6 5 0-0 Be7 6 Re1 b5 7 Bb3 d6 8 c3 0-0 9 h3 Nb8 10 d4 Nbd7 11 Nbd2 Bb7 12 Bc2 Re8 13 Nf1 Bf8 14 Ng3 g6 15 a4 Bg7 16 Bd3 d5 17 Bg5 17 ..