The Everything Chess Basics Book (28 page)

White winds up a piece ahead.

Unit Value

Another tricky part of convergence is when the attacking units, or even just one of the attacking units, are more valuable than the defending units. In those cases, a simple count of attackers and defenders is not sufficient.

Again, you need to be able to look ahead the two or three moves that include all the captures. But you also need to be able to judge who has gotten the better of the deal
after
the entire series of exchanges. For that, you need to go back to simple counting.

Black threatens to capture three times on d4, but White has only two defenders. The play goes 1. ... Nxd4 2. Nxd4 Bxd4.

Now everybody can see that the queen shouldn’t capture on d4.

Blindfold Play

This is a good place to bring up an excellent training tool. Your thoughts during a chess game will be filled with looking at possible sequences of moves in your head while an actual position is before you. Getting better at chess is at least partially based on your ability to see these sequences farther into the game. Improvement is also dependent upon seeing these sequences more clearly in your head.

Therefore, an attempt to stretch out that ability should be an excellent exercise. So what could be better than an attempt to play an entire game without looking at a board or pieces?

Too Difficult!

If you think this exercise is a bit too difficult for one who has just begun trying to understand what chess is all about, you’re right. Don’t expect to complete a whole game on your first try. And don’t expect to play very well either. Neither completing the game nor playing well are the goal at this point.

The Goal

Trying to get as far as you can while playing as well as you can is what stretches your imaginative capacity. After working on it, perhaps with numerous tries, you may eventually complete an entire game or play a reasonably error-free series of moves. But that really doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you will improve your look-ahead ability with this exercise, and you will begin to see series of moves in your games a bit deeper and with more clarity. And that is the real goal of this blindfold exercise.

Every year in Monte Carlo, Monaco, a special tournament takes place among many of the world’s leading grandmasters. Melody-Amber is a series of two tournaments, in which the grandmasters compete with each other in rapid chess and in blindfold rapid. That last is what makes this event unique. The players get to see a chessboard, but they have no pieces, and must key in their moves via computer.

Battery

This is a special type of convergence. In a battery, two friendly pieces line up to attack a piece or pawn that doesn’t have enough defenders. The attacker in front can be a rook, bishop, queen, or pawn. Anything that moves in straight lines (ranks, files, or diagonals) will do, except for the king.

A famous example of a battery is the doubled rooks on an open file. It’s also very good to have two rooks on the same rank, especially on one of your opponent’s home ranks. That way, one rook can back up the other. A particularly strong form of this is the tripled major pieces, either on a rank or a file, with the queen backing up the rooks.

The Front Unit

Knight’s don’t ever operate as part of a battery because they don’t use the normal straight-line highways. Kings can’t be part of a battery for another reason. They move in straight lines all right, but the front unit in a battery must be expendable.

The way a battery operates is that the front unit directly threatens to capture something. After the expected recapture (this explains why a king can’t be the guy for such a job) the back piece comes into play, following up with another capture.

In a normal convergence, the two attackers look in from different directions. In a battery, the direction and indeed the very highway is the same for both attackers.

The Back Piece

By the very nature of a battery, the rear unit must be a long-range piece. Therefore, bishops, rooks, and queens are often placed behind other friendly pieces and pawns in order to back them up.

The queen on b3 backs up the c4-bishop for a battery aimed at f7.

White has a triple battery on the d-file, aiming at the d8-rook. Black has only two defenders for d8.

The most virulent form of doubled rooks is the “blind pigs on the seventh.” That refers to two White rooks lined up on the seventh rank, where all the opponent pawns lack any pawn support. Of course, two Black rooks on the second rank have the same effect.

Another formidable battery is the queen-bishop duo. With the bishop in front many things can be threatened. With the queen in front, there are many cases of checkmate threats lurking. It’s a good one to know.

White threatens to capture on h7 with check due to his queen-bishop battery.

White threatens checkmate on h7 due to his queen-bishop battery with the queen in front.

Promotion

Besides threatening the king, checkmate, stalemate, and capturing pieces or pawns, a very dangerous threat is that of pawn promotion. This one is perhaps a little more sophisticated than you might think. The threat of promotion does not only refer to a pawn on the seventh or second rank poised for the coming coronation. It also refers to any passed pawn that is not properly restrained.