Quote:
Originally Posted by Rei Ayanami
One move that you should look at and rule out, in addition to the bishop-knight discoveries on g7, is the newly created "threat" 27. Re5 -- it attacks a hanging piece (and offers a pawn sacrifice ), it would facilitate an e-file doubling if just left there, plus there's some tactical geometry along the big diagonal. 27.-Rxe5 28. fxe5 Qxe5 29. Nb5 Qe7 30. Re1 Qd8 31. Qf4 is bad for Black, but alas, 29.-Qe4 seems to hold things together.
lol derp. SF says 28.-Qxe5 is losing -- 29.-Qe4 doesn't work at all.
(I didn't mention 27.-f6 28. Rxf5 g6 because it clearly failed, though.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by coon74
But how to tell if a position is concrete?
It shouldn't really matter a lot.
My correspondence thought process ended up settling as:
1) Start with an algorithmic search for tactical possibilities for both sides using heuristics that look at forcing moves, tactical seeds, etc. Usually focus on the ones opened up (or that existed previously but weren't addressed) by the opponent's last move(s).
2) If #1 doesn't turn up anything promising, think about the position in a more typical way.
3) Blunder-check. Repeat #1 from opponent's perspective for the move I decided on.
I think looking for logical moves/ideas first is a huge mistake.
What ends up happening in non-concrete positions is that time spent on #1 (and sometimes but less often #3) shrinks to zero. For example:
lol this position is idiotic. But anyway, Black just played e7-e6 (lol), and it's pretty damn obvious that #1 is going to turn up nothing, because the board didn't change, at all. So we can just jump ahead to #2 and play Rd1 without a lot of thought (or calculation).
It's better to let the position tell you if it's concrete or not, because you won't always be able to tell just by looking. (Pretty sure that in the Graveyard of Lost Points, you can find a lot of cases of people letting their guards down in "quiet positions".) So in the last example you wouldn't say "the position looks quiet therefore I don't need to look for tactical ideas", but rather "there were no tactical ideas before and my opponent's move didn't introduce any, blah blah blah". We wouldn't actually "say" either of those things as much as we'd quickly recognize them to be true.
As an aside, the distinction between tactical moves and positional moves can be pretty blurry. Most "tactics" don't win material. The usual result of a tactical search is a nifty move that improves your position somewhat. Like 27. Re5, in this position:
Yeah that's how I classify things. I prefer it that way. In case it isn't obvious, I'm serious about the attention to give pawn sacs*.
Eh, I'm running out of time to complete this post, but I was going to talk about testing out all of your purely abstract positional/strategic ideas with exploratory variations (where both sides play logical moves which don't always have to be the strongest available). Ime it works as a solid BS detector and gives you a better intuitive feel for whether your ideas are accurate or not.
*Heisman preaches the importance of looking at checks, captures, and threats. In many positions, this set of moves changes. In lots of endgames, for example, any move involving an advanced pawn tends to be worth considering. This position, where Black's king is centralized, is in pawn-sac land.
Last edited by Rei Ayanami; 02-15-2015 at 08:45 AM.