@yourimagic said in #1:
> Nimzowitsch said "The threat is stronger than the execution".
> I've always been fascinated by this aphorism.
> I'm wondering if this is true only psychologically or if it is true for other reasons.
> Also, I am wondering if this is also true in other fields than chess.
> If you have any ideas or examples about this, I would love to discuss this subject.
Having the ability to make threats on the chessboard means having the ability to win on the chessboard as a chess game; playing the position, can not be won without checkmate (checkmate is an unstoppable threat to the opponent's trapped king; not a capture) unless we're talking about losing on time controls or resignation. In chess, checkmate is everything because a king in chess can't be captured! If a king could be considered for capture, then a king wouldn't be everything in chess because chess isn't checkers. In checkers, execution matters to the very end. Of course, does the execution of a threatening move really move matter, when the opponent is paralyzed to do anything about it in Chess? Checkmate is checkmate; it's game over! Therefore, before getting to this point, the opponent must react to a mate threat unless the opponent can execute on having its own checkmate before the oppponent's opponent executes checkmate.
Wondering, can the checkmate principlebe applied to checkers? Can any piece be valued so highly that just the unstoppable threat of its trapped nature would be considered a win? I think, in checkers for this to be true, the opponent always has to walk in to it with its last piece being a checkmate from a Zugzwang, where a threat might have pre-existed before that because in checkers the opponent always gets to move before the final execution of its last piece, whereas in chess, the opponent isn't allowed to walk its final piece (the king) into a checkmate situation.
So, there are chess situations in life and there are checkers situations in life, I think. In a checkers situation, the execution matters the most, but in a chess situation, having a certain high prized unstoppable threat is worth everything! In chess, the threat is worth more than the execution because its chess; not checkers! The opponent in chess can't walk its king into checkmate before its final execution, like in checkers!
