Unlock your Genius – November 2008 (Problems)

by dlwyatt, Ohio, Tuesday, November 18, 2008, 05:38 (6236 days ago) @ giorgio

I sort of both agree and disagree with you here... a glance at the position is what led me to think that Bf5 was forced for White to have an advantage, and king activity was the #1 reason for that. Playing Bf5 forces the Black king to h6, allowing Rxe4+ would instead force my king to h3, so I immediately just started analyzing the two possibilities involving Bf5, and discarded Bxa4 without even looking at it too much.

After that decision was made, though, I had to go straight to hard analysis, first just running the "pawn race" without any particular finesses for tempo to see who won, then looking for every trick I could think of to sneak out extra advantage one way or the other. In the endgame, good ideas without concrete calculation are frequently doomed to lose you at least a half point. :)

It's such a pain to do that over the board. I've read "Think Like a Grandmaster" (which may be just about the greatest chess book I've ever owned), but still don't really have the knack for organized analysis on a timer. I still need to move the pieces and take notes to not overlook very important moves in positions like this.