Being Aggressive

In a recent installment of this blog I noted that stylistically I tend not to make aggressive moves unless they're part of an overall plan or strategy, which usually works for me but sometimes just ends up giving me stale, boring positions without much attacking potential. I recently played a game where I bucked this trend, so I decided to share the game here.

In general aggressive moves are good, as they not only maintain the initiative and thereby keep your opponent reacting to you rather than doing whatever else they were planning to do, but also they're more likely to induce your opponent to make a mistake. I believe Magnus Carlsen recently repeated something Garry Kasparov supposedly said to the effect that if you can make ten threats in rapid succession your opponent will eventually break under the strain.

If only chess were that easy. There is a downside to being aggressive: if your threats are answered by the opponent your pieces often end up on bad squares or you end up leaving weak squares in your position that your opponent exploits later on. Obviously if you've sacrificed material but your attack ends up not breaking through then you'll likely lose. The balancing act is being aggressive while having a solid position at the same time, but it's hard to pull off.

Aggressive moves are especially important if your position is losing. If you're down two pawns in material, you might as well try everything you can to attack and throw your opponent off balance because if you just meekly trade pieces your opponent will grind you down until you have nothing left. Sacrifice more material if you need to. Set some traps. Worst case your opponent sees through all that and you lose, but if you don't do something to fight back you just lose anyway and your opponent won't even have to work very hard. Make him think. Give him a chance to blow it. At my level people blow winning positions all the time due to some resource by the opponent that they overlooked.

With all that in mind, let's take a look at my recent game. For a game that lasted only 18 moves a lot happened, and the annotations are fairly extensive.

I squeezed out a draw in a game where I was losing for almost the entire game, and in fact I was still losing when my opponent agreed to the draw.

I managed to draw for several reasons:

1. After my initial blunder losing a piece I penetrated White's position with my queen;

2. Knowing I would need to get other pieces involved I played ... a6 encouraging White to capture the b- and a-pawns which allowed me to get my rook into the attack; and ... Ne4 getting a knight involved also;

3. Because his king was in peril White got defensive and kept retreating his queen to d3 for defense rather than threatening my extremely vulnerable queenside.

Even for all that, I should have lost; it's hard to recover from blundering away a whole piece. But it does show what aggressive, attacking moves can do for you. I've had this sort of game go against me a number of times, where I'm objectively winning but I end up drawing or even losing because of my opponent's threats. This time I was lucky to escape, but to some extent I made my own luck.