Hi there.
In this lecture, I would like to ask a theoretical question.
Is accumulating advantages better for us or in some way more beautiful or funnier than prevention?
What if we want to play our chess like tapeworm trees?
And what would happen?
Well, statistically, Petrosian did actually draw many, many games.
It was very, very difficult to beat.
So we might have a whole series of long, tedious, drawn games if we take prevention too far, because
prevention does have a bit of a downside.
Sometimes we're destroying our own counterplay as well as the opponent.
Sometimes the positions are like fortresses, mutual fortresses.
So okay, we don't risk losing.
We've definitely prevented the opponent, but we've also prevented our own counterplay.
Is that more beautiful?
Is that funny?
It might be funny.
And why are we even considering these aspects?
Surely, in chess?
You know, we want to win.
So we're looking for things which have advantage for us, which are better for us.
Are we really looking at our own chess strategies and games like we might search for a partner?
Like partner, We might want a beautiful partner or a funny partner or someone that fits us better for
us.
For us to be happy.
Well, I do believe I truly believe, actually, that when we strategize in our heads, we don't want
to bore ourselves to tears.
I know that some chess books like Think Like a Grandmaster by cutoff, give the idea that we should
be thinking like computer, you know, candidate moves, etc. and I detest that sort of stuff.
I actually get most enjoyment for looking at the downsides of the opponent's position.
So maybe I am treating my own chess strategies.
My favorite chess strategies, my favorite way of playing the game as a form of entertaining entertainment
as though it's a partner for me.
I want to be happy with the way I think about chess and then switch cast doubt that the accumulation
of advantages model is like some miser just accumulating money in the bank and maybe, you know, they
die one day and they couldn't take all that money with them.
Whatever too after.
So we do.
We want to act like misers.
But the thing is, that's a really negative view on the accumulation of advantages model, in my view.
Nimzowitsch himself argued.
That on a different subject.
The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance, but in the thought behind it.
Can we not argue, therefore, that it might give the impression of being a bit like an accountant accumulating
money in a bank account?
But on the other hand, how do we actually do that?
We might actually make use of prevention along the way.
We don't want to give the opponent counterplay and we might have to play positional sacrifices to increase
our advantage.
We might have our pieces in optimal places, but to break through, we might need to do an exchange,
sacrifice.
We might need to do what seems to be anti position.
We might need to decentralize the knight to reroute it, to improve it, to improve pieces.
Sometimes sometimes we need to take a step back to go two steps forward.
So the net gains.
So there is a beauty in the kind of paradoxes, I'd say, of accumulating advantages.
Sometimes we under able the opponents pawns to create more exploitable weaknesses that we can get hold
of.
So all the paradoxes, the creativity, and even the sacrifices which might need to be made to further
increase the advantage in the position is part of the toolkit.
And generally you could say if you want to win games, you give the opponent a bit of counterplay.
Actually, you know, there's a prevention to an extent, but maybe you have to give them counterplay.
So you have counterplay.
So it's not like a fortress position in an extreme where you might as well just agree a draw.
If neither of neither you, your opponent has no breakthroughs, no pawn breaks, nothing to do.
That's a bit dull potentially, but I do like the idea that Nimzowitsch is not just in general what
I do like about this.
When Nimzowitsch casts doubt on the beauty of things, is yeah, we need to enjoy chess.
We're not all professionals and it's very difficult to be a chess professional.
So if enjoyment is a priority, then perhaps we should look at our chess strategies as our kind of partners.
I like thinking about downsides.
It does work for me.
I win lots of tournaments online.
I like the way that chess works for me, and I don't work for chess.
You know, some grandmasters give you these prescriptions and what if you didn't enjoy their prescriptions?
What if you didn't enjoy the openings that they chose for you or something like that?
If you were having grandmaster training, it's, you know, you take control in a driving seat like
in the driving seat positions in the driving seat of how you choose to even play the game conceptually.
But for me, yeah, the accumulation of advantage model has a lot going for it and it's nice to have
one way games where you weren't scared of being completely crushed because you limited counterplay to
an extent.
So it's definitely a very important part of the toolkit in general, restricting what the opponent can
do.
Prevention can be really very, very useful.
And while we're at it, you know, partner traits reflected in our chess strategies, do we need our
strategies to be funny?
Well, Nimzowitsch certainly was very humorous in my system.
You know, he talks about past pawns being criminals that needed to be kept under lock and key.
You know, active surveillance was not enough through his humour.
You know, the writings also passed the test of time.
There's a lot of humor in his writing, so he obviously was quite funny as well.
And in his games, you know, some humorous looking moves like Knight right to the corner to, to re
centralize it later.
So his idea is prophylaxis is quite a funny word nowadays for contraception.
I think the word prevention is probably less funny and more useful to us to think about prevention if
it's for a specific move or preventing the whole of the opponent's position not moving at all.
So prevention seems to be a more functional word and more useful.
So we've got to find our own balances of priorities.
So yeah, you know, John Cleese, you know, he liked humor.
He was editing things to make things more humorous.
That was a priority.
If you if you're doing a funny sketches, etc., or Fawlty Towers were checking if you've ever seen
Fawlty Towers, because it's good to to smile and laugh.
It induces positive hormones.
So if your chest causes you to smile and laugh or your strategies, then that's great potentially as
well as exercise generally.
But anyway, so it's accumulating advantages really mightily.
This is my question.
If it involves creativity and paradoxical looking moves, or let's use them as Victor's own argument
against them, lots of thought is behind the process.
I would say it's great.
Potentially you can make it a lot of fun.
You can look at your opponent's downsides as a way of trying to increase your advantages.
I absolutely love it.
I absolutely am as passionate as chess as I ever was.
And we can make use of or sacrifices, which seems to be, you know, rebelling against the laws of
material.
Or when you sacrifice a rook for a knight or a bishop.
But the long term trend is good for you.
You know, that's a lot of creativity and fun.
Or you can do what seems to be anti positional moves, but you create a lot of pressure and play, you
know, the creative conversion of advantages into more exploitable ones.
It's creativity, it's fun, it's interest, it's enjoyment.
Now, no counterplay, counterplay games have a lot of beauty.
If we look through some of the masterpieces from Nimzowitsch, his opponents are left without any moves.
You know these immortal Zugzwang games often in Nimzowitsch games.
And can it be more entertaining to let opponents also self destruct?
If you have restrain them out of desperation, they try and release the shackles of some positional
binds and they self destruct.
Maybe that's funnier sometimes if it's not more beautiful.
Maybe it's just funny to let the opponents do that.
But bad plans is, you know, it's argued in this course they can be much, much worse than no plans
at all.
And I want to give you an example of petrosian against caution in which korchnoi evicted caution in
which in their early encounters in 1946.
So they had this long hatred of each other throughout their careers.
It seems, of course, being in the factor probably didn't help towards that.
So so here you know we have c sex a Dutch stonewall was being played against Tigran Petrosian and it's
a brilliant plan at the time.
It's kind of kind of a modern plan for the time be free just to exchange off the bishops.
So it seems there's an element of prevention here with this plan against the Dutch Stonewall.
If we can eliminate the Dark Square defender and we can blockade on E5 and, you know, reinforce blockade,
we can aim to keep the pawn on E six locked in and the bishop kind of just useless potentially, unless
it tries to regulate attack, it might take a lot of moves.
So the idea of restraining the pawn structure to in-turn restrain the pieces is evident here.
So this is about restraint and prevention and prophylaxis.
So Black Castle Bishop, a free the bishops came off course going on the attack with Queenie A We have
90 C to Queen H five.
But why is kind of being very calm here?
Queen C one we have 94, C one so one just maneuvering to lock the E six pawn.
So G 593 And these pool moves are pretty commensal pawns.
Don't go backwards.
90 795 So dramatic turn of events already.
Why is e two offered?
We have eight.
So E two is offered because.
Sure.
Using the calculator a forcing sequence here.
Can you see what we do if Queen takes E2?
There's upsides here.
For us, this apparent aggression is weaknesses around the King.
There's a vacuum of weaknesses.
So this is kind of funny how this backfires In this variation.
Bishop takes E for eliminating the defender on G five.
So that was also a kind of funny, you could say, funny weakness for the last movie The Queen coming
to E to away from G five because now we're making inroads with the Knights and this is such a strong
position.
If this happens, this is just crushing and that's just completely lost here.
This is just a completely lost position.
And these pieces are still dead.
They haven't gone out of bed yet.
So yeah, a bad idea to take the pawn in a nutshell with Queen takes E2, just in case you're wondering.
So King H eight, we have three.
And for me, after E four.
Yeah, it does seem a funny game.
What happens here?
It's been called like a case of jujitsu or something.
What happened?
How this magically transforms up to C takes D five.
Like D takes E, five, D takes E five, C takes the five.
We have e takes D, five, E takes D five an F four.
And you can see that Black's game seems pretty bankrupt here.
A lot of pieces on the back row D five is a target.
White's pawn chain looks mighty strong.
The Bishop.
That's fantastic, you know?
Wow.
Rook D eight is played.
We have Queen seven a terrible infiltration to deal with.
B six we have F two, G five giving whites the F four square upside bishop a six and now have four and
it moved 23 Korchnoi has to resign to be fair, of course, was just 15 years old in this game.
A very talented 15 year old going on to become, you know, one of the uncrowned kings of chess, know
potential world chess champion so close to becoming world chess and so black has to resign.
If queen takes G five, Queen takes F seven, Bishop takes F, one rook takes F one.
Petrosian was young as well, but a bit older than than korchnoi in this game.
But this is just hopelessly lost.
So we see here a case that prevention is very, very useful versus a direct attack.
We see that it is kind of dramatic as well.
That could be another attribute drama or the drama of this game through prevention rather than, it
seems, actively searching for our own possibilities just to kind of take all the upsides from what
the opponent is doing.
So Petrosian had some beautiful games like this where he's saying, you know, come and get me.
And it does create sometimes very, very beautiful games.
This game against Boris Spassky world celebrated by Spassky, went for him and there was a beautiful
queen sacrifice at the end so beauty can result from prevention.
And the opponent trying to break the shackles of things, can overcommit, create new weaknesses, new
downsides.
And if you're dynamic enough, you can offer material and expose those weaknesses.
So prevention can have a real sting to it.
It can be done with a view of vicious counterplay attacks after where there are a lot more weaknesses
than they ever were before the opponent started to attack you with only part of the army.
You know, part of the army is just still in bad hair.
So this is kind of an entertaining game, a dramatic game in my view.
And many where Petrosian was saying, you know, come and get me.
And he wasn't seemingly actively following his own plan, but rather preventing the opponent's pieces
or part parts of the opponent's army of pieces.
And the result, you know, weakness, creation, even more potential downsides to tap into.
And if there's minimal risk, Petrosian will play super dynamically to expose those weaknesses.
So, okay, I would say, you know, counterplay reduction, keeping the opponent's counterplay to minimal
levels or ineffective counterplay, there might be counterplay, but it might be not not as dangerous
as yours.
Yeah, it's it's useful tools whether counterplay destruction of the opponent is more beautiful or funnier
or useful than the accumulation of advantages model.
Well, you can reason about that yourself.
But I would say, you know, they're both very, very dangerous ideas in chess.
Prevention is better than cure is a very, very powerful concept which applies on the chessboard, and
it can lead to desperate measures from opponents to over weaken themselves.
The accumulation of advantages is generally the scientific backbone of chess that.
Ideally, we want these one way games where we gradually accumulate advantages with minimal hassle.
I think there's beauty and entertainment and drama and even humor in both these models of playing chess.
So it's whatever rock your boat rocks your boat, basically whatever entertains you and you get maximum
enjoyment and pleasure from on site.
But yeah, the positional viewpoint is worth integrating into our own chess so we can have that hat
to put on.
If circumstances dictate that we need to prevent the opponent's counterplay is good, that we're aware
of positional players as well as the great attacking players.
And you know, it was with great delight that I do have a course on Tigran Petrosian.
I just chose his wins because I don't like playing through draws generally, and that's my bias.
So you see a lot of particularly chosen shorter wins.
They're quite dramatic, showing what a great tactician he is as well.
Tactics is also beautiful in its own right and separate from positional play.
Of course, in attacking chess, there are many beautiful aspects of chess.
We can find beauty and maybe we should think more about nimzowitsch that the greater the thought behind
something.
Then we increase some things beauty, and maybe it's also its humour and the same that value as well.
The more we think about the intricacies, it's like different aspects unveil themselves.
So anyway, so I hope you find this for provoking this introduction lecture.
I couldn't let it go.
This question.
I know it's like a question which might not have absolute functional value, but generally we do want
to enjoy our chess and we want to be in the driving seat of our strategies.
So I thought, it's interesting to compare.
Do we need this accumulation of advantages model or can we just sit there, really strengthen our position,
destroy the opponent's counterplay, let them self destruct, then pounce on them after?
What's interesting is the way you want to play it.
Och, I think it's good to be able to put on different hats in chess, attacking tactical etc..
The range of hats increases our enjoyment of the flexibility of how the game can be played.
Och, hence much.