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Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Blunders, Not Tactics, Win Games


   Tal created very unclear positions by making sacrifices that engines quickly demonstrate to have been unsound, but he wasn’t playing engines. 
    Tal was an incredibly strong player and he knew his sacrifices might not be fully correct, but he judged the resulting position so messy that they, like chess problems, gave his opponent many ways to go wrong and the refutation required moves that were hard to find. 
     For most amateurs, rather than using imagination and creativity, our “tactics” involve throwing away some material without any really good reason and calling it a “sacrifice” or playing for a mating attack with moves like Ng5 and Qh5 and hoping our opponent won’t see an obvious threat or will make a gross blunder. For us, that is playing tactical chess. 
     We do this because we have heard tactics win games. While that may be true, the fact is for most of us amateurs, our tactics usually aren’t sound nor are they clever like Tal’s. If they succeed it’s usually because our opponent’s blundered. We just like to call these blunderfests “tactics.” 
     Since my state’s governor announced that all indoor sporting events, including high school, collegiate and professional sports, shall continue without most spectators in attendance in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus, the high school basketball championship game I was planning on attending was out. Instead I had to play some online chess and the following game illustrates my point.

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