Chess Strategy

While struggling to find some spare time and write a follow-up on the Opposite-Coloured Bishop Endings, I’ll take the liberty to post an excerpt from John Emms’ wonderful book “More Simple Chess”, which is a sequel of his bestseller “Simple Chess”. In these two books, Emms, one of my favorite authors, explains the basic strategical principles in an entertaining manner that most of the intermediate players would find very helpful.

Emms was not arrogant like many of his colleagues that appear to “know everything” and has included many of his own omissions from practical play, where he tries to draw conclusions for both himself and the reader.

John Emms: My interest in this subject of knight retreats was rekindled to some extent after a painful experience in a very recent game.

I had just captured a pawn with N(e5)f3 and I was expecting Jonathan to resign in a couple of moves. In fact, after the game continuation 32. Rhf2? Nd4 no one would argue if White threw in the towel. Unfortunately for me, Jonathan played a few more desperate moves and I somehow managed to convert a winning position into a lost one.

While I was inputting my game ChessBase and letting Fritz find an enormous number of wins for Black, I did find an amazing resource for White that Jonathan and myself either failed to consider or rejected during the game.

The point is that White can actually stay in the game after 32. Ka1! (Diagram 1). During the game I rejected this as a possibility for White in view of 32…Nxb2 33. Rxb2 Nxh2 when Black wins easily, but White has the much stronger move in
33. Nb1!

Now I can’t honestly remember if I spotted this idea or not during the game. It’s even possible that I did see this but rejected it because of 33…Qxa2+?? 34. Kxa2 Ra4+, missing 35. Na3(!). In any case, after 33. Nb1!! Black doesn’t actually have a totally convincing reply, for example (Diagram 2):

a) 33…Qa5 34. Rc8+ (perhaps it’s this I missed) 34…Rxc8 35. Qxc8+ Kg7 36. Qc3+ Qe5 37. Rxb2 and White is better.

b) 33…Nd3! (I’m note sure I would have seen this; Fritz, of course has no problems spotting knight retreats!) 34. Nxa3 Nxc1 35. Rh3 Nxg5 36. Rg3 f6 37. Rxc1 Rxe4 38. Bxa6 with a very unclear endgame.

Looking back at the original position (Diagram 1), it somehow seems unfair that White has a defence that works, but this example does go some way to showing how good a knight can be protecting its king. Have you ever tried checkmating with queen and king versus knight and king in blitz - it’s not that easy!