Now that Family Xmas is over and the Relatives have Departed,

A little follow-up to this thread-

Having taken your criticism to heart, and having finally finished Ivashchenko's 1a & 1b, I stumbled on a book that really looks like the best answer to learning more about exchanging pieces: "Your Kingdom for my Horse," by Andrew Soltis. He addresses the potential dangers and novice bad habits you warned about while working through the why's and when-to's of piece exchange. I've only just received it, but it really looks like a great book and just the ticket. I am excited to work through it and have made it a goal to use it as a compliment of sorts to balance my studies with Blokh's, "Combinative Motifs." (Blokh looks tough, but no pain, no gain).

Hi Andrew,

the idea presented in the video is very much work and touching different topics at once. So I doubt it is appropriate for many people. Choosing a random position is a great idea.

cathexis wrote on 12/09/20 at 22:29:38:


Very interesting questions and a very thought provoking post. GM Eduard Rozentalis often aimed for Endgames early, his opening repertoire was tailored for it. Swedish GM Ulf Andersson also liked to get to the endgame, off the top of my head I can't really think of anymore Opening to Endgame players. 

If you like endgames might I suggest the Exchange Ruy Lopez  https://www.chessable.com/the-smart-ruy-lopez-exchange-variation/course/48889/

Some players don't like their king being attacked early so they choose openings accordingly, while others encourage attacks on their King by provocative choices etc etc.

We all have our preferences, but it is useful if we all learn to be more universal players able to handle many scenarios competently.

I was an inveterate wood swapper (and resolver of tension) as a rising club player even where the trade resulted in a slight worsening of the position.  On the one hand, that made me a tenacious defender and I gained a lot of rating points by drawing against higher rated opponents or even winning when they over-pressed.  On the other hand, in retrospect, as mentioned by others, this held me back quite a bit and undoubtedly limited my potential improvement considerably.

I have strong thoughts on this. Basically it's a cheap and ineffective way to play chess.

I knew an experienced master who was a self-styled "endgame expert". He would play openings like in the Mednis book. But when preparing to play against him, I saw that he wasn't noticeably stronger in the endgame than in the opening or middlegame. By playing rather directly for endgames I think he was worsening his chances overall.

Correct chess should be played without style. You should play the move, or plan, that the position demands. Sometimes that's developing, or exchanging, or sacrificing, or prophylaxis, etc. There is a small place for psychology in this process, but Botvinnik was good at the psychology and most players (e.g. Fischer) are bad at it. Of course everybody *has* a style, but style is something innate that happens to your moves when you are trying to do something else.

When I know that my opponent has a policy of exchanging pieces, this is easily exploited. For example, I can is offer to "let" my opponent exchange pieces in a way that gives me a tempo, gain of space, control of a file, etc. Gary Lane calls it "predict-a-move". Of course if they don't exchange, that doesn't mean that I will. Exchanging-type players can't stand the tension for very long, sooner rather than later they will make the swap and give me my incremental improvement.

According to Salov, he seems to have been disinvited to major tournaments after falling afoul of Kasparov. I can believe he offended some important people, then was little mourned by other players. And wow, looking at his paranoid rantings--anti-Semitic, crazy crazy.  But what's the deal with Lalic?

The expression is "chop wood," not "swap wood."

Eagerness to exchange pieces is a classic weakness of style: if you develop the habit of going in for exchanges, it will seriously mess up your game. Euwe even devotes a section to this fault in his middlegame book.

Eagerness to exchange short-circuits the essential positional and strategic thinking process of assessing your pieces. In the opening, if you initiate an exchange, you very often give your opponent increased development or piece activity. And in every phase, it is very important actively to assess the current usefulness of your pieces, to keep the pieces that are most useful to you and exchange off the least useful while doing the opposite for your opponent. 

Exchanging to avoid tactics and attacks (which is what you are doing) is addictive because it will feel as if it's working: you're surviving longer in each game--you almost never lose in 18 moves, and you feel you at least made a fight out of each game. Meanwhile, your other skills atrophy. You become like a boxer who only knows how to clinch. The greatest endgame masters, however, were also amazing attackers.

So when do good players chop wood to enter an endgame? Among other times,

(1) When they know that their pawn structure, material advantage, bishop pair, king in the center, etc. will make their endgame objectively better than their middlegame.

(1a) When their king is under a dangerous attack.

(2) When they think certain opponents in certain match situations will perform better in the middlegame than in the endgame. But this is not what it appears. In the Botvinnik-Tal match 1961, for example, Botvinnik prepared openings to prevent Tal from getting open positions with lots of piece play. True, Botvinnik took some early queen exchanges, but Tal started avoiding them, at some cost--as Botvinnik knew he might. Botvinnik also  allowed Tal to grab pawns. As a result of all this, Botvinnik was able to tear Tal's head off with aggression in favorable middlegame positions, so that by the time an endgame came, it was a good one for Botvinnik.

(3) When they want to make an equal position clearly drawn by reducing it to a drawn endgame they know how to defend. This supposedly prevents the opponent from muddying the waters too much, but even for grandmasters, it's dangerous. Playing for the draw is often known as "playing for the loss."

(4) When they are endgame specialist club players who have studied and explored the endgame deeply. But you're not an endgame specialist because you lose middlegames--you've just been playing players or computers that are better than you. And you're certainly not an endgame specialist just because x computer program happens to be worse at endgames than middlegames. After you've studied some endgame books thoroughly and played lots of endgames against humans (refusing all draw offers), you might ask yourself whether you want to be an expert a this phase of the game.