Hi there.
In this introduction lecture, I just want to talk about the game selection criteria that I preferred
throughout this course.
I like iconic games, and when I say iconic, you can actually kind of measure it.
Chess games come as a great site for master games.
I like to look at games that are in more than 60 collections, ideally as a general rule, because that
means why are people collecting this game?
Is it special in some way?
Usually they are.
And the most iconic games of all time, like Bobby Fischer's Game of the Century or the Paul Morphy's
opera game, these are in the most collections, as you might suspect.
That's often a good guide to the iconic games, so they inspire and encourage for the attacking patterns.
I've chosen the ones that are in particular attacking games.
I've also looked at the more notable games, according to Wiki, throughout chess history as well.
And often those are in more than 100 collections and shinny.
So one of the points is also to reach out the nuances of the great attacking games you may have seen
before.
Just make sure.
Did you get all the attacking ingredients or were you kind of just looking at the final combination?
There's a great temptation just to kind of forget the rest of the game, but we're really interested
in how to get there, how to get these attacking positions where these beautiful combinations arise
from.
They don't just arise from thin air.
So we want to sort of see the magic behind that.
And, you know, absolute classic games like Retief versus Alekhine, one of the queen's greatest masterpieces.
It's nice to see all the nuances when we go in detail.
So the attacking players that are most often in mating combination books.
So our time, for example, is featured quite a lot in my Art of Chat Main course.
It's no coincidence statistically he features there quite a lot.
So the attacking player preferences and even if there aren't examples right now, my ambition is to
evolve this course as a kind of work in progress.
And I will take from the engine world alphazero especially, you know, that's like one of the first
hard hitting like neural networks which defeated a version of Stockfish in spectacular style out of
this world style.
So I would like to eventually get examples from the engine world.
So Stockfish, Leila those would be poured in to the course from time to time.
And we have a reassurance there when the beats that a traditional engine, there's a reassurance that
actually this attacking theme has real substance to it, like form pawns or bishop about a counterpart.
So some of the attacking themes, I'm actually drawn from the engine world.
So sadly.
Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan, my good friends, wrote this book, Game Changer.
There are some game changing, attacking principles of interest.
We should really try and observe from the neural network world in particular.
So it isn't just brute force calculation.
So in terms of traditional human world champions, the attacking ones for me personally, Alexander
Alekhine, Mikhail Tal Petrosian, you might think is totally defensive.
He didn't win many games, but when he did go on the attack, sometimes they're absolutely brilliant.
We can learn to attack from a position of defense for trying to provoke the opponent to have lots of
weaknesses.
So he's interesting as well for me, and he's made some magnificent combinations.
Boris Spassky is a more obvious attacking player and had much better results in instalments than Petrosian
when Chosen was even world chess champion.
So Spassky is a, you know, classic attacking player.
People only remember Petrosian.
People only remember Spassky for he losing in the 1972 match against Fischer.
But he is a great attacking player to learn from Veselin Topalov.
Vishy Anand of course, Garry Kasparov, arguably one of the absolute greatest players of all time.
So you've got other attacking players.
Paul Morphy, an unofficial like world champion who was basically the best in the world for his time.
There's Matloff who is kind of restrained in opportunity.
He was a magnificent commentary player, absolutely beautiful combinations and even positional queen
sacrifices.
Tönnies is Spassky's trainer for be nice to look at Polish how he influenced Boris Spassky.
Aronian, who's a fan of Alexander Alekhine, are the greats.
Geller, who went on to do coaching.
He had a brilliant career and he even, you know, was was one of Fischer's kind of he could victimise
Fischer, even Geller.
BRONSTEIN Very crazy.
A kind of uncrowned king of chess.
Joe Bova.
Very creative, aggressive grandmasters.
Same with Nakamura, one of my favorite super grandmasters.
And from presenting Nakamura games like his H for Attacks against the Pits, I've adopted some of his
opening sequences with great success.
Shirov Judit Polgar, Rudolf Spillman, who was nicknamed the Lost Romantic.
So we want to pay tribute, especially for me.
I like to play personally tribute to more of my observation.
Sure of because in the Lloyds Bank Masters, they came and they conquest.
Many of the British grandmasters.
Most of actually actually won the Lloyds Bank Masters in 1994 with nine and a half out of ten.
So this is what I mean by the benefits of attacking style for Thomas, where you need to rack up the
points.
Even with Black, he was playing very exciting openings and trying for the win and great attacking chess.
Let me give you just one game example of that.
So a British grandmaster he encountered.
What happened in 1994.
From this position, you can see the game in great detail.
It's analyzed in much greater detail.
I'm just going to give you the gist.
94 was played and he got a kind of form pawn.
So it looks like counterintuitive, doesn't it, to block up the rook, But it's the kind of emphatic
marking of the dark squares of interest.
So Bishop G5 and Black has some issues here which we're trying to solve be solved with Queen B6 offering
the F6 Knight Now here a clever move 94 which is better than Bishop takes F6 and now Bishop takes f6
here Queen A4 And now what?
This is a representative like pawn sacrifice to gain time for the attack.
Nine C3 So we have Bishop take C3.
Bishop take C3.
So even with H two hanging, what he has done is mark out these dark squares with the form pawn.
So you can see there's an attacking ingredient and attacking signpost here which is worth the pawn.
If Queen takes a to bishop, take C4 so there's no naughty threats of Queen one mating, for example,
that Knight is taking out that square D2.
It was Queen C4.
You know, this position has strong attacking prospects for white as example.
So the pawn wasn't taken and we see actually B3 encouraging the ball to be taken here but now rook D2
and this point stranded so all of a sudden.
Yeah.
Finesses the position it's difficult it seems to get onto the dance squares right now but this is potentially
stranded.
We do have an imminent D6 to F6 as well but so there's two kind of major downsides.
It's not just the king.
The knight is about loose Queen, a free Czech bishop B two queen E7, and it's the knight being loose
which is victimized.
They were Bishop E too.
So the no longer has Knight takes F1 as an option.
So there's there are options for one of either a four at some point or queen F2 to embarrass the knight.
So we have f we have D takes e4, F takes E4, Queen takes C4 and now Queen G trying to get onto that
diagonal so you can see an amplification attacking strategy, trying to amplify this bishop on those
raw sensitive dark squares.
95 and the game was finished off brilliantly here.
So can you see how for 100 points so more is which.
Yeah, just coming here to UK to London where I live and destroying some of the British grandmasters.
This is a compensatory finish.
The rook takes D5.
We have Queen St's d5.
If Queen takes E2, there's just Queen f6 and here King B one.
And how does Black defend this position?
There's also options.
Bishop A3 Potentially.
So we have Queen tanks, D5, Queen F6, King F8 and now Bishop C4 and Black resigns.
What happens if Queen D7 then indeed Bishop a free check and black's going to get checkmated for example,
like that.
Yeah.
So there's brutal finishes, a brutal game in general which is shown in this course, but I would like
to get other examples and they might not be in many collections.
Sometimes I use the 60 collection rule as a general rule, but some of these attacking players had these
magnificent tournament results.
You know, like nine and a half out of ten in Lords about Masters, you know, this was a tournament
I really admired loads of 2500 years from coming, you know, sometimes unsigned.
So it was a really fantastic tournament.
It's really fantastic to see attacking players in particular.
For me on the demo boards, it really fills me with excitement to see how Kings could be demolished.
So anyway, so you get just a general idea of the game selection criteria in this course.
I like the iconic games, but I will choose other games.
There might be simpler examples as well in fewer collections but simpler to understand.
So that's a kind of priority for examples in general, simpler to understand, to empathize with, and
to recognise mistakes that our opponents also make and how to punish those mistakes.
But we also, you know, check the classic world chess champions and the aspiration for the courses
is to get examples from each of these sources as appropriate for an attacking style of chess type game.
So I hope this seems exciting and interesting and inspirational.
So be inspired and it's fun to see beautiful games whilst learning the art of attack here in this course.
Okay, that's very much.