Annotated Game #3: Znosko v Alekhine

I just worked through the game Znosko v Alekhine. My thought, when I finished was : shit is way over my head. If after move 15 Alekhine truly came up with all of those plans at that moment that is amazing, but how am I to come up with such plans? There is no way in hell I would have seen all that to come up with that plan that early in the game. This is just overwhelming. I want them to teach me how to come up with a TO DO list, not just generate one and show me!!!

Perhaps I won't be able to really appreciate this game until later in the course.

I did take home a few points from the game:
1. In the endgame, when it's all about promotion, he who counts tempi best will often win (e.g., that Alekhine was willing to give up a pawn and Bishop, calmly calculating that iit would give him time to win, that guy had nerves of steel).
2. When you really must win, don't go for symmetry. Alekhine created a crazily assymmetric pawn structure, with a mobile duo on the e and f files, going against many other principles to do so.
3. Try to create threats/induce weaknesses on two sides of the board in the endgame.
4. Alekhine was a freaking genius. I ran that game through Fritz and he played almost perfectly.

LOL.

What you saying sounds very familiar. A lot of material seems like it's over my head first time I'm going through it. Not necessarily ICS material (some is) and other books.

But if you continue to work through it you will definitely look back at it at some time in the future and "get it". I recently looked at some book I started reading almost a year ago (when I started studying chess seriously) and it all made perfect sense! Almost all the explanations were pretty clear!

I'm seeing that I'm able to incorporate more and more strategy into my games. Obviously it's far from being sophisticated but at least I'm able to come up with better plans and tie it together more. 3 months ago I was just making separate completely not connected moves and hoping for a miracle I guess.

I usually give myself two or three days to go over a game that I like. The first time I play through very quickly, or maybe I don't even play through it -- I just look at the notes and if they seem helpful to me, then I will play through the game quickly to see if I like the flow of the game or if it just seems way too complicated. I might play through it a couple of times very quickly.

After that (next day?) I will play through more slowly and try to "guess the next move." This is great exercise recommended by many top writers from Purdy to Heisman to others.

I liked the Capablanca-Fonaroff game so much I was able to memorize and play through it for a few days from memory! I probably can't remember the moves now, but I enjoyed that game very much.

Give it time mate it will definitely come to you. I have no doubt Alekhine saw all that at move 15 and he probably saw it really quickly as well.

It's overwhelming for us because we are still struggling with concepts but once you become used to it its second nature.

I've been study Daniel Kings Power play DVD series, the first volume and there is a tremendous amount of study on the Greek Gift sacrifce.

Since then I've won two games using that idea and can tell practically at a glance if the conditions are right to go in for the sacrifice, and then if the king is forced to g6 how to procede, either with a queen check on the d3 g6 diagonal, the queen straight to g4 or a h pawn advance.

Once you learn the patterns its very straight forward to see.

Alekhines win over Znosko will similarly become intuitive after you've played through a few more games like that.

I mean already from that one game you have learnt that in a endgame type postion with material equality you want to close access to your second rank from your opponent's rooks, seek to open files for your own rooks that enable you penetrate to your opponent's back ranks and aim to put your opponent on the defensive and tying up his pieces to the defense of a pawn or key square.

Exchanging one rook makes the job easier and when you're opponent has his pieces defending one side of the board, advance your pawns on the other side to open more lines and give yourself the possibility of switching files with your rook and presto, you've managed to penetrate your opponents camp!

Well it's not always that straight forward but just that single game gives a decent outline and I feel aready from that one game I am much better prepared to enter a similar endgame postition than I was before.

Capablanca's win over Marshall and the draw with Alekhine are both tremendously instructive as well and I've had good results since studying them. In my last game for example I had the option to capture a pawn but remembering Marshal's critical mistake against Capablanca was failing to control the d file instead of winning the pawn (the obvious move) I first took the d file with my rook as that was more important to the longterm strategy than a single pawn.

In the event the game was drawn despite me going two pawns up as I made a mistake late on in an area ICS havn't covered yet and I was clueless as to how to proceed

The games I seem to struggle with most are those that involve advanced tactical combinations.

The Yusupov Rozenthalis game for example I found hard work to understand what was going on.

By contrast the Alekhine Znosko, the second two Capablanca games and the Anand games were all really interesting and enlightening to me.

I probably could play through most of those games from memory now but the Yusupov game was hard going.

Bilbo: that's useful to hear your take. I plan to go over the games again (indeed, I've gone over all the material now for month one so plan to do it all one more time after doing the month one thinking exercises and 'choose the move' exercise).

Not to disrespect Alekhine, but in writing his annotations he may have had an agenda - i.e. publicity for the next world championship match, and therefore the plan is laid out as if the opponent had no moves of his own (with hindsight) or ability to influence the outcome. More likely, he made several short-range plans (TO-DO LISTS) over the course of the game, but the annotations indicate that everything is clearly mapped out from the start. Yermolinsky has some interesting thoughts on chess literature in this regard in his book.

Just to add - the idea of the asymettrical pawn structure with e-and f-pawns, to increase the chances of obtaining a passed pawn, was very interesting.