Hi there.
In this lecture, I'd like to talk about the focus on attacking the opponent's king in this course.
So the focus of this course is essentially how to get the attacking positions, which lead to very juicy,
beautiful, iconic combinations sometimes in most games.
So these are often based on checkmate combinations at the end.
Some of the most brilliant games of all time are based on really beautiful combinations such as Paul
Morphy's offer a game.
The thing is about such beautiful, iconic games.
Sometimes people just play them over for that beauty.
It's good to actually take a practical perspective, in my view.
If you are a player, a chess player, wanting to improve, to ask, you know, what are the details
that which led up to the combinations, what were the attacking ingredients used?
So in the pool Morphy opera game, which started off like this Paul Morphy with the white pieces against
two players in consultation.
Paul Morphy in the opening got very good position already.
Here he has what I'd say is a bishop of our counterpart, and that forms a major section of this course
where we have a bishop without a counterpart.
That to me is a major ingredient, and it's also brought out to me in games of neural networks where
sometimes a neural network has emphatically sacrificed pawns to amplify that ingredient.
So we are when we when we want to do successful attacks against stronger and stronger opponents, we
don't want to be too unsound.
And in fact, we have to respect the accumulation of advantages model, which the first official world
champion, Muhammad Steinitz, kind of viewed.
So he viewed chess as a kind of science.
There's a balance between the two sides.
And what we are particularly keen on is emphasizing the attacking ingredients here.
So what do the advantages specifically include?
So this is, for me, an attacking ingredients, and it's already made use of with this concrete France
here on F7.
So this is just a a great example of an iconic game where now a very accurate move here is looking at
B7 and F7 and it causes an issue for king safety.
Another ingredient has been triggered.
The king in the center and that is an entire section in itself.
If you can encourage the opponent's king to remain in the center a bit too long, then you've got a
greater basis for compensatory play.
Later, we see C3 C6 and again, you know, this lack of development, peace development.
So, okay, we have Bishop G5 B5 and you know, this leads to a remarkable combination here, which
some of you may have seen before, but let's look at the combination as well.
So we're all going to look at not just the ingredients, we are going to play the game and look at the
combinations.
Well, Knight takes B5, so it's exploiting the king and the sensor is exploiting actually also pieces
that are kind of asleep, which in itself is another attacking ingredient.
So the more we can appreciate the attacking ingredients, the better.
I mean, this game has been analysed in much greater depth in this course, so this is not meant to
be a detailed analysis.
I just want to show you how some of the sections of the course relate to attacking gradients, which
you can see in in some of the most iconic attacking games.
So C takes B5, Bishop takes B5 check, so the king is still in the center and Paul Morphy castles.
Queenside So these guys are kind of largely asleep and it facilitates now an amplification of pressure.
Rook takes these seven exploiting the absolute pin against the king, and the other rook is brought
in knowing that basically it's very difficult for black to influence these seven with a dot square bishop
and a bishop and this rook still on H eight so ends up with a brilliant combination here of the bishop
takes the seven check 967 and for the aspect of combinations, I do have a course called The Art of
Checkmate and for the aspects of concrete tactics.
I do have a course called, you know, the complete guide guides tactics, but this course is really
on the ingredients build up, which lead up to the combinations because you might that might be a kind
of jigsaw piece that you might feel is missing.
How do you exactly get those positions where you get the combinations?
You've got to carefully build them up through the accumulation of advantages you've got to.
With.
You know, good accuracy to get these advantages usually from the opening phase and make sure they can
be used.
You know, these ingredients can be used for amazing combinations later.
So here, once play finishes off with a beautiful mating combination, so can you say, well, that
is 100 points.
Yeah.
Queen Bee eight check.
So nine.
Thanks.
Bee eight.
We have the eight checkmates.
So we're going to look at iconic games and you'll see in the sections I say C's mean number of collections
are a very popular site called Chess games.
Com which is one of my favorite sites for looking up most of the games.
And we're going to try and reinforce the ingredient section so we can train on each particular ingredients.
So it could be bishop of our counterpart, It could be things like Queen in Siberia, it could be,
you know, pieces of sleep.
There are ingredients we want to kind of focus and get our examples together and really train on the
ingredients so we can get that going much more in our own games.
So here, if we focus on the points I wanted to make in this particular lecture, so we really basically
are focusing on KING Attacking versus general attacking.
You could attack on the Queen side.
You could be trying to win material.
This is not really the main focus of this course.
This is about attacking the king.
It's not really about aggressive play as such.
It's more about attacking the king.
We don't need to play aggressively.
We can kind of play scientifically.
As long as we get a checkmate at the end.
We don't have to fill ourselves with aggression or anything.
No, it's about objective attacking chess, which has been seen at the highest levels of chess and past
world champions, you know, notably Alexander Alekhine and Garry Kasparov.
So these these were players who really love to attack the opponent's king.
So.
KING attacking for me is often much more attractive for the wins it can produce with beautiful combinations
online.
If you have a choice between attacking and defending, I would choose attacking most of the time because
one defensive step in the opponent could be, you know, checkmate.
It's harder to defend accurately, especially on the fast the time limits.
Also there's the most popular format online is not a traditional Swiss stone.
You have to wait for all the games to finish for the next round.
It's these all you can eat almost.
You can win a game and you get another game immediately.
So if you study attacking plans, you're you're getting that mindset of kind of finishing off games
quickly so you can rack up the points and win lots of tournaments.
I'm one of the tournament, you know, top ten leaders, Li Chess for winning a record number of tournaments.
And I just love quickly finishing off opponents through attacking chess in one day.
Chess, the beauty agenda can make it worth it.
So you're not just spending all of those hours just for a point on the scoreboard to increase feed rating.
That's a very mercenary way of looking at chess.
If you can create art as well as win, that's even better in my view.
But yeah, we have to be practical sometimes.
And if there is something like high risk, like sacrificing Ukraine, I wouldn't recommend that Generally,
if there's an easier, much simpler way of winning.
So you've got to balance, you know, the pragmatism of it to the art.
But art can be a beautiful agenda if you can create a masterpiece.
So there is a kind of downside of sacrificial attacks.
The romantic era of chess had a certain element of what I'd call much more risky vein of attacking chess.
This course is more on the solid, you know, the accurate and solid, but still attacking chess.
If you imagine four quadrants, we really want high accuracy and high solidity.
That's kind of synonym accuracy and solidity.
And we want to be able to attack the opponent's king.
And the greats like Alekhine and Kasparov demonstrated you could do that.
You don't have to play romantic era gambits.
But also Boris Spassky did actually literally play romantic era gambit, The King's Gambit, and he
beat all sorts of players, including Bobby Fischer with The King's Gambit.
So sometimes the romantic era isn't completely dead, but that's that's another subject.
But yeah, we're focused here on on kind of solid, accurate, attacking chess against the opponent's
king.
That's really the focus of this course.
So we want to be able to scale up to stronger and stronger opponents.
I don't want to give you any like small like ceiling.
I want you to be able to have confidence that you can beat anyone basically at any time online or offline.
So, yeah, there's a you know, basically it's a it's a great mindset to have, in my view, especially
for online chess.
You know, you win on time sometimes or may because the opponent might even, you know, they have to
spend time to find accurate defensive moves.
So that's why this is not this is not the complete guide to defensive chess.
I think there's a lot of perils for that.
But if you do like defensive chess as a means of not losing, check out my my Tigran petrosian course.
But I do pick out his.
Wins rather than his draws in that course.
But he really didn't lose much at all.
Tigran Petrosian also Capablanca didn't lose much.
That's another role model for more positional super solid, not minding end game transition chess.
But in this course, yeah, we're taking that bias and running with it.
It is a bias.
And you might think, Oh hell, hold on.
Isn't chess about playing the position in a scientific manner?
Well, yeah, but when we're playing against humans generally with emotions and humans are not good
at relentlessly playing accurately like a hundred moves in a row, like an engine can play.
So when you wake in your opponent's king, the potential for slipping up it becomes like dancing on
ice.
I don't know about you.
I wouldn't last more than a minute trying to dance on the ice.
I would usually fall over.
So the need for accuracy, you know, we're not we're not accurate creatures, basically.
So if you can get attacks which give you great potential for winning through one slip up from the opponent,
that's where you want to be, in my view.
So attacking players also create a kind of independence of losing material.
So losing material could be like just losing a particular battle, but you might still win the war.
So that's like this classic book, you know, Win Friends and Influence people, which you may have
read or may not have, you know, read.
It's worth checking out.
But basically sometimes, you know, in in win friends and influence people, you don't want to kind
of win a little battle with with someone, a colleague at the expense of your future you know relationship
with over like years.
It's good to win friends and influence people rather than like get people hating you because you you
did something to annoy them to to win some silly debates.
So in chess, the silly debate could be like, well, we'll take this pawn, take this night, I'm going
to make your king.
You want to think about the overall battle, the the overall battle.
The overall battle is called the war.
You don't want to think about individual battles.
You want to win the war.
So sometimes it's acceptable to lose material in attacking chess.
But of course, yeah, we do want to play soundly as well.
There needs to be an element of great soundness.
It's the soundness which will make us more scalable for stronger and stronger opponents.
We want to play accurately from the opening accumulate advantages ideally and checkmate beautifully
ideally in my view.
So that's why we have a focus on this course On attacking the opponent's king in, you know, in a solid,
generally accurate way.
But we do give ourselves some slack when I say that there's some independence of losing.
So if we did lose material, there's some slack.
Because if we do have pieces around the opponent's king, it may not matter.
We lost to Rook over here or a knight over here or your whole queenside, especially if you're a King's
Indian defense player.
You wouldn't mind if you lose your queenside because you're checkmate opponent.
So there is an aspect of independence of losing material which is very attractive in my view.
There's the aspect of putting the opponent for the need for accuracy and using lots of time potentially
that's very attractive as well.
So from a practical point of view, attacking chess, I found, is a formidable weapon and improving
my enjoyment of chess considerably.
And so I've even, you know, my nickname is King's Crusher.
So there is a kind of bias in my nickname.
And you could say, Well, hang on, hang on.
Any bias is a weakness, right?
That's true.
But as I say, we're not computers.
There are universal players in chess to study like, you know, more universal like, you know.
Lasker.
Capablanca Fischer The universal dream is a good dream, especially if you, you know, become a grandmaster
or something one day.
You don't want to have an obvious bias.
It's generally a solid game, but this bias is useful for reaching the top as been as has been demonstrated
by Alekhine and Garry Kasparov.
I mean, Kasparov completely dominated his peers for a huge number of years as well.
Champion in brilliant style, brilliant, attacking, you know, crushing style.
So okay, I hope that introduces the focus of the course and I hope you really enjoy it.
Thanks so much.