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Chessville
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Chess Instruction
The When of Attack There are many players who know only too well how to attack once they get the opportunity. Knowing when to attack is much more difficult, especially for players at club level. Amongst the most common faults I have seen in my students' games are an apparent allergy to the exchange of queens and a will to attack from almost every position. This often means violating chess logic which might well demand that queens are exchanged, that you go for quiet positional pressure or try to neutralise your opponent's initiative. Learning this kind of discipline is very difficult, especially if you play for fun. But I should point out that if you want to make better results then you've got to do what the position requires. Chess literature can be rather misleading in this respect. Everyone writes that you have to play according to an appropriate plan yet the games that tend to get published usually feature dramatic attacking play with material sacrifice and kings getting chased all over the board. I hate to disappoint you but such encounters do not represent the grim reality of the vast majority of chess games. Normally you should struggle for the d5 square or try to weaken your opponent's pawn structure. To try and attack in every game will have mixed results, brilliant success in one game and dismal failure in the next. The following two games were played by Alan Silver, a player with a definite romantic streak who seems to try and bring off a brilliancy in every game. Sometimes he succeeds in playing a really nice game like this one from a tournament in Italy:
In this game everything went well because brilliant attacking chess was the right thing to do. But Silver's quest for beauty often leads him into trying for brilliancies when it would be better to play a quiet, dull but effective line. This next game shows will show you exactly what I mean:
Like Alan Silver, Gavin Cartwright is another out and out attacking player with an excellent feel for the initiative and ability to see combinations. He also has the same weakness in that he doesn't always choose the right moment to go for the jugular! The following game is deeply instructive in that Black gets nowhere when he plays for mate on the kingside with 14...Qg5 and the rabid advance of his f-pawn. But when he finally admits that this was inappropriate and settles down to play an endgame, he goes on to win from a slightly worse position.
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