Hi there.
In this lecture, I want to talk about attacking chess and beauty.
Now, this might not be everyone's preference.
You might just want attacking chess and accuracy and beauty is just a side effect.
But, you know, we live in a world of social media, and you might want to share really beautiful games.
You might want to have the brilliancy game of some tournaments.
There might be tournaments with the brilliancy prize in general.
And if you look at games databases in for example, chess games, com it's one of my favorite sites.
You can see people adding the beautiful games in general to their collections more and more like the
Paul Morphy opera game is an extremely beautiful game.
And do we actually want to make beauty a priority and how do we actually make it a priority?
We do have to be strong tactics and combinations to have beautiful finishes so you can have an attacking
style, but you might not be finishing in a beautiful way.
And so, yes, I do have a course on The Art of Checkmate because it is like an art of mating and beautiful
mating patterns and combinations, and also the complete guide to chess Tactics.
So these Help Crown are attacking style with beautiful conclusions.
So you might not be totally mercenary sometimes, or you might permit yourself to try and play a more
beautiful game as particularly pleasing in the end.
So there is a kind of beauty tradeoff attacking style versus beauty tradeoff.
But we do need our combinations to be sound.
Ideally, we don't really want to trade off our results and our accuracy by playing something extremely
dodgy with the hope of getting a beautiful combination when the opponent could have just avoided that.
Taking risks for results is not really my cup of tea.
Usually when I try and calculate some amazing queen sacrifice or whatever I do kind of double check,
triple check.
Because you know, when you embark on sacrificial play to try and create a masterpiece, you are incurring
risk.
So hopefully most of the time you understand that and you're not going to be playing uncertainly just
to create a brilliant finish, which has some flaw in it.
But, you know, Kasparov versus Topalov, you'll see these in this course.
There's a lot of beautiful game examples in this course.
And the beauty angle, Yeah, I do find it interesting to be able to tell you the number of game collections.
So you've seen each section sees like 150, sees 200, sees the number of game collections, people
collected games, then shows sometimes an element of beauty in those games.
And for me, you know, we want to learn in style.
I like to learn in style.
Everyone likes to learn in style.
Things nowadays, like interactive ways of learning, mathematics, whatever we want to learn in style,
we want to have beautiful games to learn from.
And we see, you know, very nice combinations.
We play quite often to crown the efforts and the whole attacking style.
You know, definitely a bias for King attacking.
You know, that's what we kind of, you know, live for in a way.
It's not just the results on on the tomb and say, well, unless you're like a chess professional,
it's all about the results and income, but maybe, you know, you're not in that situation.
And so you can permit yourself to see, you know, the art of chess, not just the, you know, the
results of chess.
And, you know, many attacking players have said in the past that or of attacking players that even
if they didn't win the tournament, their games will be held up for celebration, you know, hundreds
of years later potentially.
And that's why you've got things like the Immortal Game, you know, or Evergreen game.
They're going to be looked at in later generations.
So when you create beauty on the chessboard, you are kind of creating sometimes a work of art.
And I remember I had this Queen sacrifice game when I was playing for Muswell Hill Chess Club, and
I actually had a sleepless night over it.
Usually I have sleepless nights when I lose, and I need to get into analyzing the game to make sure
I can get my sleep back, just to try and learn the lessons, to try and change it from a sporting event
to a more scientific event to say, Well, okay, at least I learnt this and this and this.
But I had this effect of doing this Queen sacrifice, which is a bit of a downside that you might not
be able to sleep after through over excitement.
But if you're into social media, you might start a channel, some YouTube channel one day.
You know, to have beautiful games is something great to share with other people as if you're sharing,
you know, works of art.
So you could, you know, live for beautiful moves.
And also, you know, I like shackling sometimes I'm beating a very strong opponent with a beautiful
moon.
I see the chat light up on online in the comments.
So, yes, creating beautiful games is really it can be a you know, a great.
And it can be rewarded, especially with things like Brinsley Prizes.
In the past, you know, players were getting brilliancy prizes or, you know, when they had amazing
efforts, creative efforts.
But the romantic era of chess is where we had these unsound gambits.
And even though it was, you know, very beautiful in the end, sometimes it was kind of unsound how
to get there to the beautiful combinations in the end.
So
basically, yeah, we really want a king attack style that.
Is there and also with hi beauty at the end.
But yeah, this those are two variables.
But if you factor in accuracy, you do also want accuracy.
Then it's kind of assumed by this.
For me, it's assumed I still want accuracy.
So yeah, if I can finish games off beautifully without compromising accuracy, if I can play games
from the outset without compromising my openings too much playing dodgy stuff, then it's kind of less
regret when you hit stronger and stronger opponents, then.
I'm not just embarrassing you because you had a poor position from the opening.
Yeah.
You want to have this slight bias picking style attack and maybe, you know, a slight preference for
beauty in the end for beautiful combinations at the end.
So because that'll help if you want to like share these works with other people.
So basically, yeah, there's a slight conflict between appreciating beauty sometimes in the Immortal
Games which might be kind of dodgy openings or whatever, or the romantic era in general.
There's a lot in the romantic era which Alexander Alekhine actually came after.
So the romantic era, it kind of was beautiful, but not so accurate.
But that's kind of assumed in this course that we we do actually want accuracy in general.
And our points out, even in wins of an attacking player where the opponent could have had resources
to the fence or sometimes be better, we need objectivity.
If we go back to Alexander Alekhine's quotation about objectivity, chess teaches you basically objectivity.
So yes, beauty is a nice to have.
There is an argument, you know, for this noise to have, and especially if you're prepared to put
in the work in to be brilliant at combinations and tactics so you can have those final brilliant crowning
combinations.
Okay.
So you too could potentially create more and more attacking masterpieces, which are also, you know,
they're very, very beautiful by nature.
Okay.
I hope you got some thoughts out of this.
Got some food for thought from this angle and so much.