Okay, it's week 2 of the forum book club on My System by Aron Nimzowitsch and we're onto Chapter 2: On Open Files. Have a look through it and come back with anything you found particularly enlightening or particularly mystifying.
Topics covered:
1. Introductory. General considerations and some definitions.
2 The genesis of open files: By peaceful means. By assault. The objective.
3.The goal of every operation in a file. On some accompanying phenomena. Marauding raids. Enveloping operations.
4. The possible obstacles to be met within the line of operations. The block of granite and how to mine it. The conception of protected and unprotected obstacles (pawns). The two methods of conducting the attack against obstructing enemy pawns. The "evolutionary" and "revolutionary" attack.
5. The restricted advance in one file with the idea of giving up that file for another one. The indirect exploitation f a file. The file as a jumping off place.
6. The outpost. The radius of attack. With what piece should one occupy an advanced position on a center file, and on a flank? Change of roles and what this proves.
Minor point of terminology: what Nimzovitch calls an open file includes what more recent writers would call a half open file. What he calls an outpost is slightly different from what more recent writers would call an outpost: looking at (say) Stean and Nunn, they both define an outpost as a post for a piece that can't be attacked by enemy pawns. For Nimzovitch it's essentially a post for a piece that can only be attacked by enemy pawns at the cost of leaving a critically weakened pawn on a half-open file.
Link to the first chapter discussion, which had some great points:
https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/my-system-chapter-1-on-the-centre-and-development
nice!
I'll probably come back with more on this later, but one thing that really stood out for me was the idea that the point in attacking a weak pawn on an open file is mostly that to win it we have to gain control of the square that the pawn stands on and hence (normally) penetration into the opponent's position - if the pawn wasn't there we'd be piling up in a similar way against the empty square, or one of the squares behind it. This is something that I'd never really grokked properly - like, why go to all that effort just to defend a pawn when you could probably get counterplay elsewhere if you weren't tied down to it.
I like the way that the section on undermining basically ties in the minority attack (without naming it as such) as a corollary to play on open files. Also the way he links it in t outposts.
That’s common sense today (if I got it right). Nowadays we say the square remains weak even when the pawn is gone.
#5 I guess for me it's what they call a "blinding flash of the obvious"...
Sections 1 and 2...
"The theory of open files, which was my discovery, ..." -Nimzo
This sort of boasting puts people off. It may have been the style of the times, or Nimzo trying to make a name for himself. However, for today's readers this boasting, combined with the idiosyncratic writing style of this book, is very likely to make them close the book by page 21.
That said...
Silman also uses "open file" when others would say half-open. Chess definition of basic terms is not as uniform as many people think.
The paragraph on "play against a piece or against a point" can be looked at as Nimzo trying to generalize many different positions as having a unifying idea; which is why he says "There is in fact no fundamental difference ..."
"... for the measure of the mobility of the Pawn will tend to zero, ..."
Sounds like a mathematical statement, and could be evidence in the opinion many have that Nimzo was trying to make a "scientific theory" for chess.
I liked his discussion of diagram 17 and variants he proposes. He is explaining a procedure that would later in history be called a pawn lever. See "Pawn Power in Chess" by Hans Kmoch. I also liked his sentence with reference to the positions he's considering:
"To sum up: no Pawn exchanges, no file-opening; no file-opening, no attack."
Section 3...
Nimzo's terminology in discussing diagram 18 is not what we would say today. I know he's trying to make a point about his "theory of enveloping attack" etc. On the move 3.Q-R8 ch, he says "... followed by a marauding expedition (for so we designate every forking attack on two pieces) ..." but we would not call this a fork, but instead a skewer. Yet he's right that it is an attack on two pieces, using the normal extended definition of "attack" that includes indirect attacks.
Why do I bring this up? Because I've seen some people recommend this book, or at least the first part of it to beginners (people uninitiated to chess theory and definitions of chess terms, regardless of playing experience). I feel like such beginners are better served by using modern resources; which are much more likely to speak somewhat the same as each other.
By the time your are initiated, you can appreciate all the different ways of looking at such a position. You see the monster pawn at g6 (Sillman's term), the enveloping attack, the push of the King when the 7th is invaded, and the skewer of the King and unguarded Queen - which indeed is also a fork, because it attacks two pieces. Hindsight is 20/20.
Section 4...
I really like this section. Though much of the terminology did not survive , the ideas did. I still use "block of granite", or "biting on granite", and I'm not the only one. I think I'll start using his "thinning of the ranks" terminology.
In my copy there is a slip of terminology when Nimzo says at one point "converging", when to be consistent he should have said "evolutionary". I have to disagree with his statement that the chronological order of considering the two methods should be the evolutionary first. I recommend, as do many others, to calculate forcing variations first. For one thing, if the revolutionary attack is decisive then you are done calculating. Indeed, in his diagram 22, the revolutionary attack ends in mate.
I've seen in modern sources the use Nimzo gives to "protected" meaning "protected with a pawn". He says:
"Protection by pieces may almost be called a confusion of terms; the Pawn alone will stand on guard solidly, patiently, without a grumble."
Section 5...
"The file as a jumping-off place. [for a Rook]"
This eventually got called a "Rook lift"; right? There is a nice article on Rook lift here by ArnieChipmunk (CM Arne Moll)
https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-application-of-morphys-rook-lift
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