World Champion Magnus Carlsen beat Hikaru Nakamura (1-0) in the game below to win this division of the Airthings Masters tournament and a cool $30,000 thanks to this decisive game. Notice how Carlsen used the cramping pawn on e5 and the wedge pawn on h6 to restrict Hikaru, eventually clinching the win in a rook and knight endgame due to Black's weak back rank. This is world class chess.
In this Champions Chess Tour event the Airthings Masters 2023 with a prize fund of $2 million dollars, Hikaru Nakamura failed to win as White against World Champion Magnus Carlsen in the armageddon, being knocked out by the game in the gif below. Nakamura played the Reti with 1. Nf3 and 2. g3 and was absolutely reti to rumble, but did not conduct his attack on the kingside fast enough, allowing Carlsen to put all of his pieces on good squares and fend it off. Well done Magnus! All 5 of the games between Magnus and Hikaru were drawn, but they were quite wild and complex battles. They can all be found at the link here: www.chess.com/events/2023-champions-chess-tour-air…
Nakamura just beat Le Quang Liem quite impressively in round 9 of the AirThings Masters, as seen in the gif below. The sequence 18. Rxd7 Qxd7 19. Nxb6 Nd2 20. Qd1 Qc6 21. Ncd5! Bb4 22. Qxd2!! was a great calculation. Well done Naka!
ROTATE CHESS IDEAS IN YOUR MIND'S EYE
Rotating a concept in your mind’s eye allows you to see it from all angles and think about a topic much more deeply, from vantage points you never considered, recognizing subtleties you did not realize existed. Aspects like pawn structures in chess can be appreciated much more deeply when structural manipulations are studied, as well as exchanges, and conceptualization of attacks and initiatives. Attacks need to understood from the angle of why the attack succeeded and the defense failed. This delves into the world of pure, clear logic, but physical hooks help aid our understanding here a lot. Rotating minor details of the attack in your mind’s eye deepen your perception of what you just saw. Likewise, we often make logic work in a game by tweaking a seemingly strong idea that does not work for a clear reason. You have to consider the transformations, the reasoning for weakening your own structure, best and worst case scenarios, and research the ways your favorite structures have been handled from both sides. A complete classification helps give you a full field of vision to move forward.
Rotating a concept in the mind's eye is a skill that can be developed through working from first principles, using reciprocal logic, and visualization and mental imagery exercises. It involves the ability to imagine something and manipulate it in your mind as if it were a real object, so you see it completely differently.
Here are a few exercises that can help improve your ability to rotate concepts in your mind's eye:
1. Start by thinking about a bare bones pawn structure that you know very well. Now in your mind quickly manipulate that structure to create an isolated pawn. Do you see how quickly you were able to do that? Now you are aware of what kind of minor change in the position can create a weakness, from rotating a concept in your mind’s eye in a couple of seconds.
2. How about when dealing with a piece. Think of a typical symmetrical pawn structure. Now alter the position in your mind with a very strong, stable knight outpost for one of the sides. What square was it and how did it happen? The how explains the way in which weaknesses are quickly and unexpectedly created.
3. Rotating a concept in your mind’s eye when it comes to 3d chess pieces is best done by visualizing simple objects, such as a cube or a sphere. Imagine it in your mind and try to rotate it in different directions, paying attention to the details of the object as it moves. You will get better at the visualization process with practice. In the end, this process helps you understand pawn structures, strong pieces, weaknesses, and attacks much more clearly by doing this with any regularity.
4. As you become more comfortable with simple objects, try visualizing more complex shapes, such as a knight. Visualize piece paths for the knight, like my video showing the knight tour of touching every single square on the board. See how much of that you can follow in your head.
5. Practice visualization from different angles and perspectives. Try to imagine what it would look like if you were looking at it from above, below, or the opponent’s side of the board. The 3d board in ChessBase helps me do this..
6. You can also try to practice rotating concepts and objects while having a chess piece in front of you. This will help you to strengthen the connection between the physical object and the mental image. Hold a queen in your hand and think about the queen being on a stable central square. What allows the queen to be stable there? Answering this kind of a question immediately deepens your understanding of piece coordination and piece activity.
7. With practice, you can improve your ability to rotate objects and chess concepts in your mind's eye, see piece paths clearly and even X-Rays that you would have missed, and use this skill to help you better understand the complex relationship between dynamic objects.
It is important to note that this skill, like many others, takes time and practice to develop and improve, but over time you will become an incredibly deep thinker.
It's that time of year again: sale day for ChessBase. It's also the time every 2 years that ChessBase comes out. The new version is very good and well worth buying for any serious chess player. Deeply analyze all of your tournament games and save them in one neat database in ChessBase with clear verbal explanations of all of your mistakes and reviewing your databases will be incredibly instructive for you. Use simple and clear concepts to understand your mistake and your understanding of every important concept in chess will skyrocket.
What To Do When You Forget Your Openings
I have been asked many times what you should do if you forget your opening lines in one form of the question or another. The first thing you should do is think about your goals in the opening.
Let's take some examples, even without exact moves. What if you have played White in the King's Gambit Accepted and are down a pawn still by move 10 and you forget what to do? Traditionally your goals would be to occupy the center with pawns (since the central stronghold on e5 is gone, making way for an uncontested pawn on d4), get a lead in development and attack the opponent's king. Are you able to achieve any of these goals? If so, how can you achieve them in the fastest possible manner? This will give you something concrete to do, and as long as you are aware of your opponent's threat if they have one, you will be thinking about the right things.
How about almost the exact opposite example? What if you are playing Black in the Queen's Gambit Accepted and you forgot your lines in the opening? What are you trying to do? In almost every single line, you want to try to trade off all of the pawns on the c and d-files and find good squares for the rest of your pieces. Thus, if you had not played ...c5 and traded off the pawn for White's d-pawn, you have a ready-made course of action. Once this is played, you will have to choose your piece setup in accordance with where the opponent's pieces are to avoid direct threats and weak squares being occupied. The core of the setup to aim for is one in which your worst-placed piece is not bad at all and all of your pieces are on useful squares.
If there are extremely important variations that are do-or-die and may lose for either side if forgotten, you want to use every possible tool at your disposal so that you can either recall or find the only moves if you must. This means using every possible memory aid or hook available. What helps me is always knowing the opponent's threat with every opening move I study, while also knowing my own goals. If you are dealing with the most critical line of your entire Grunfeld Black repertoire for example, slide through the variation 5 or 6 times with your arrow keys, focusing intently on the piece paths and threats of key pieces you have to notice. Just seeing the line and the final position of that line flash on your screen 5 or more times certainly helps give you visual pattern recognition that serves as an unconscious hook, even if you are unable to perfectly memorize a line over 20 moves.
Once you start doing this in all of your openings, not only will it become a habit, and lead to much greater understanding of your openings and the structures you play, but it will seem easy and automatic to do. With the tools we have available today, basic known information is not out of reach of any average chess player for free, so we need to take action and study actively, explaining to ourselves everything we understand and observe while we study our openings.
Untapped Resources for Chess Learning
A great untapped resource nearly every chess coach and content creator is missing out on is posting their favorite moves in a clear, easily visible and easy to find place. An Instagram profile is a perfect place to put great chess moves, so I have posted almost 250 strong chess moves here: www.instagram.com/imerikkislik/
I gained 100 Instagram followers in the last day and am now above 5,200. This is a good sign for chess, as we need more educators producing high quality content, which is similar to book quality material for those yearning for more serious study material. In essence, my profile resembles a free chess book you can read at leisure, whenever you would like. As someone who simply loves chess, I would love it if another IM or GM showed their favorite chess moves all in one easy place to find just like this. I hope I am making up for a tiny bit of the slack there. A number of strong players have told me that their favorite games and their favorite individual chess moves frequently do not overlap. A great solution then is to post their favorite games as a gif or video on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, and their favorite individual moves on an Instagram profile, convenient to scroll through. Doing this also gives prospective students a sense of how they explain chess positions and think about the game, and may even gain them more students. I also like that hashtags work better on Instagram than on any other platform I have used, so I can easily be found through the chesssuccess hashtag.
There is a lot of great potential here. I hope we make the most of it.
Slow moving people want fast results. What they really need is consistency and a passion for curiosity. It's hard to get started, but it's easy to keep going, so you have to use momentum over a long period of time to become strong in chess. The curiosity to always want to know how you could have played better and to not settle for less forces you to analyze all of your tournament games deeply, ideally saving the results if you don't want to lose them and want to have them to draw deeper conclusions in the long run.
People have asked me, "How do you focus on chess for so long without distraction?" The answer for me is actually pretty simple. I find almost everything on social media to be a lot less interesting than analyzing chess positions, saving the results, and reviewing them and the understanding I built periodically. This speaks to the tremendous value of having all of your chess content in one workspace in ChessBase, easily accessible and well-categorized.
As one example, earlier today I wanted to look up all of Kasparov's wins as White against Anatoly Karpov in World Championship matches. Know how I did it? I opened up my database "World Championship Games" organized chronologically, and went down the line popping open all of the 1-0 Kasparov-Karpov games and my analysis on them. In doing so, you have a crystal clear perception of your own thoughts on the games, what weaknesses Kasparov created and exploited in the games, and exactly how he won. Every chess player should be able to do this and should want to do this, but part of the problem is that they never get started, and the vast majority believe they could not do this on their own until I show them exactly how to do it, step-by-step. Doing independent work like this on a regular basis becomes contagious, is easy to keep doing, and will make you a very good analyst. Your chess won't be dependent on anybody else after that. You can do everything on your own. Watching hours of content very loosely related to your own games, openings, and play will seem less and less interesting to you over time as you become fully self-sufficient and things that are not local to you have less impact. I even tell this to Grandmasters so they can stop hiring me and stop paying me. It is for their own good to have well-checked deep analysis on everything.
Do you think Magnus Carlsen will make it to 2900?
Magnus Carlsen won his second game in a row today, this time against Giri. His live rating is 2868.2, only 31.3 points away from rounding up to the majestic 2900 rating on a rating list. I personally really hope to see it and think it would be great for chess.
International Master dedicated to bringing you the latest games and strategies in the world of chess. As a rapid improver as an adult, I understand the challenges and dedication it takes to improve your game. Join me as I cover all aspects of chess, from openings to endgames, and help you become a stronger player. Let's improve together!
I was a relative beginner at age 18 and became an IM at age 24. I worked methodically and consistently on my own to improve as rapidly as possible. On this channel, I share some of the tips I have for how you can do the same thing as well. After becoming an International Master, I began coaching Grandmasters, and started to coach muItiple elite players in the top 100 in the world. I share some of this opening knowledge for free on this channel. In 2016 through 2019, I was ranked the #1 chess teacher in sales on the entire internet for numerous months. I also wrote 2 books.
Good luck with your chess. I will try to help you along every step of the way.