Back to Basics: Tactics
By Dan Heisman
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Back to Basics - Dan Heisman
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Chapter 1
Safety and Counting
A Counting Primer
Pins, forks, and removal of the guard tactics usually occur several times during a game. Counting takes place whenever exchanges are possible – almost every move after the early opening.
Tactics can be considered the science of piece safety, with the goal of winning material or mating. Recognizing an opponent’s tactics is equally important so that one can prevent losing material or mate. Thus, at the start of a game, defense is just as important as offense. One can approximately divide all tactics, in increasing order of average complexity, into five levels:
1. En Prise – an unguarded piece that can be captured.
2. Counting – determining whether any series of captures might lead to losing material.
3. Single Motif – pins, double attacks, back-rank mates, removal of the guard, etc.
4. Non-sacrificial Combinations – combines motifs (including counting).
5. Sacrificial Combinations – Same as #4, but it involves a sacrifice.
En prise is the easiest to understand. Here is a simple example, after 1.d4 Nf6 2.e4?:
Black to play
The white e-pawn has been placed en prise and Black can – and should – capture it safely with 2...Nxe4.
Counting: The process of determining whether each piece, for both sides, is safe on each move (using only the nonglobal on its square
definition).
Most beginner’s books bypass counting and immediately delve into single motif tactics: pins, double attacks, removal of the guard, etc. Yet, players rated under 1400 (below the average adult tournament player) are very susceptible to making counting errors that cost them games. These errors may occur because they misunderstand the value of the pieces, but often they just miscalculate. Hence, we begin with this important chapter on safety and counting!
Counting is the process of determining whether any series of captures might lead to losing material, if it doesn’t then the piece can be captured safely
– at least safe from losing material because of counting. Much more on this below!
The Average Value of the Pieces
Many players learn the following set of average piece values:
Pawn = 1 pawn (not points!)
Knight = 3 pawns
Bishop = 3 pawns
Rook = 5 pawns
Queen = 9 pawns
I call these Reinfeld values because many of the beginner chess books in the 1950’s and 1960’s were written by Fred Reinfeld and included these values. They can be used to solve most of the play and win
problems in this book, because if you find the correct sequence, then you should finish the problem ahead in material and any reasonable set of values is acceptable. Reinfeld values are very easy to teach beginners, but if you are going to be a good player you are going to have to graduate from them or at least not adhere to them slavishly.
Note that Reinfeld’s numbers cannot be exact, if for no other reason than the average value of every piece cannot be an exact integer multiple of the value of a pawn. That would be like saying every human being is exactly an integer multiple of one foot tall, and has to be exactly 5 or 6 feet in height.
In 1999, Larry Kaufman wrote an award-winning article in Chess Life on piece value, based on a scientific computer study of about 80,000,000 positions! To summarize Larry’s findings, the best average piece values (rounded to quarters) are:
Pawn = 1 pawn
Knight and Bishop = 3¼ pawns
Rook = 5 pawns
Queen = 9¾ pawns
Larry also found that having the advantage of the bishop-pair (when you have both bishops and your opponent does not) is worth a bonus of about a ½ pawn. Additionally, while the king has infinite value, the fighting value of a king – usually seen in the endgame – is about 4 pawns. These are important ideas to remember and use!
An easy way to use Larry’s values is to consider the exchange (winning a rook for a bishop or a knight) as worth about ½ a piece (a piece
in this context always means a bishop or knight). This is quite a bit different than the Reinfeld value, which places the exchange’s value at about two-thirds of a piece. That is a big difference in percentage!
Another way to evaluate material in terms of a rook is that the exchange is worth about one-third of a rook; a piece is worth about two-thirds of a rook; a queen is worth about two rooks; and, of course, a rook is worth one rook.
These average values are great starting points for players above beginner level and can be extremely helpful in many normal
situations. The actual value of a piece is determined by how powerful it is in a given position and is a much more complex subject!
Checks, Captures, and Threats
A capture is when a piece moves and takes an opponent’s piece off the board. A threat is a move that can do something positive, if not countered, on your next move, such as win material or checkmate. If you make a move that threatens to capture an opponent’s piece on your next move, that is called an attack. An attack on a king, of course, is called a check.
The list of forcing moves is a mantra I give to my students: look for checks, captures, and threats! It is important to note that not all attacks are threats. For example, in the diagram below, the black queen attacks the knight on a4, but it is not a threat since Black would then lose his queen to Qxa4.
Safety and Counting Definitions
Some players think that counting is simply knowing the value of the pieces and understanding, for example, not to trade a rook for a bishop because a rook is worth more.
Safe: A piece is safe if no possible sequence of exchanges on the square it occupies will lose material, assuming best play by both sides moves.
The definition at right will clarify when a piece is safe with regards to exchanges on its square. Here piece
includes pawns, but not kings, which are special with regard to safety issues. This definition will subsequently allow me to present one for counting. We need to assume best moves in our definition because you can always lose material on any capture just by playing poorly and refusing to recapture! In that case every attacked piece would be unsafe, which is clearly not true.
As a simple example of safety, suppose you can trade pawns, then both side’s pawns are safe because it is a fair trade and no one loses material. It is very important to note that if we expand our definition to the entire board, and not just a square, then the global definition of safe would involve all tactics, and not just exchanges on a particular square.
With White to move in the following diagram, the black bishop on b4 is not attacked, so from just a counting standpoint the bishop is safe but, of course, White can play the double-attack 1.Qa4+, and thus the bishop is not safe from a tactic. If it were Black to move in the same diagram, then the knight on c3 is not safe even just by counting since it is defended once, but Black could capture twice and win a pawn.
So, considering the entire board, we must expand our definition of safe, as shown below.
Safe (global): A piece is safe if no tactic by the opponent involving the capture of that piece can forcibly win material (including counting!).
Counting: The process of determining whether eachpiece, for bothsides, is safe on eachmove (using only the non-global on its square
definition).
However, identifying all the ramifications of this global definition of safe is a very complex topic – and well beyond the scope of this book! So back to counting.
To determine safety, you do not have to count on each square on each move! This is an important practical consideration!
Most advanced players have a subconscious important squares database
that consists of whether or not all attacked squares are adequately guarded. They update this database on each move: only the squares affected by the move are recalculated. If everything was safe on the previous move, then one need only look at the affected squares of the next move to determine if something has become unsafe. Therefore, stronger players don’t often leave pieces hanging
from one move to the next. This process becomes routine with adequate practice. Note that if one uses the global definition that includes all tactics, then a more detailed analysis is needed to ensure all your pieces are safe.
There is a fine line between the tactical motif removal of the guard (see Section 2.7) and its simpler cousin, counting. Removal of the guard involves captures on multiple squares so that a defender is captured or has to move and the defended piece is no longer safe. However, the distinction between the two concepts is somewhat tricky because safety has to be determined on all squares each move, so multiple squares are often involved even on purely counting issues. The difference is that, with removal of the guard, the safety on one square is directly dependent on the removal of the defender from another square, while in regular counting the safety of each of the multiple squares is determined independently. Confused? Don’t worry, clear examples lie ahead!
In the diagram below, the rook on e6 is not safe because White can play 1. Bxe6 and win the exchange (rook for bishop) provided Black recaptures. White does not have to continue with 2.Qxe6?? losing material; chess is not checkers – you don’t have to capture!
Contrast this diagram to a removal of the guard example in the next diagram. Through simple counting, both knights appear to be safe: 1.Bxe6 dxe6 is a trade of bishop for knight, both roughly worth the same (3¼ pawns), and 1.Rxc6 dxc6 would seem to lose the exchange for White.
However, when we combine these two exchanges, we can easily see that the d7-pawn is overworked. Overworked pieces that guard attacked pieces leads to a removal of the guard tactic. White should play 1.Bxe6
If Black does not recapture, White remains ahead a knight. But if Black plays 1...dxe6 then White plays 2.Rxc6 since the knight on c6 is no longer guarded and White still wins a knight. Thus the safety of each black knight is interrelated, making this a removal of the guard problem, and not just a simple counting issue. Note that the opposite move order, starting with 1.Rxc6, while still winning material, is not as good. After 1...dxc6 2.Bxe6 White has won only two pieces for a rook, which is not nearly as favorable as winning a piece. I calculated that result by counting the traded material, but this is not a counting problem – see the difference? See Chapter 2.7 for more about removal of the guard tactics.
If you use Larry Kaufman’s values (henceforth just the value
of a piece), then trading a knight and bishop for a rook and a pawn loses about half a pawn worth of material. However, if in doing so you also lose the bishop-pair, you lose a total of about 1 pawn, which is approximately what it takes for one master to beat