ChessFeels #33: "sight-reading" the board
"I inspect you through the future see millennium" - Inspektah Deck
One of my students asked me a really excellent question the other day. The sort of question that, after a certain amount of playing and teaching, I start to forget doesn’t have an obvious answer to everyone. And teachers who make too many assumptions is a huge pet peeve of mine. So I thought it would be worth writing up what we talked about and sharing it with everyone.
It all started when I made an off-hand comment about the importance of deciding how we want to play based on factors on the board. My student understood the general idea: you trade off pieces when you’re winning and keep them on when you’re losing, for instance. But, he went on to ask, in relatively equal positions, how do you figure out what factors on the board matter and what to do with them? How, as he put it, can you sight-read the board?
To address that question, I started with this thematic position from the London System, after white has just played 8. Ne5:
Before trying to recall any knowledge you have of this position, or trying to pick any moves, I want you to try and get a feeling for the board, and see if you can point to why you feel the way you do.
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I’m very aware that if I was not trying to ‘play by feel,’ my first two candidate moves would be 8…Re8?! and 8…Bd7?!, since both follow the check-list of continuing my development. But if I go by feel, I get the sense that both of those moves risk being too passive. How the HECK are we supposed to *know* that these perfectly natural developing moves that in other positions are automatic are, here, too passive? What does that mean? This is a great question. Here’s what I think is going on:
White just brought their knight to e5. This is the first piece or pawn to cross the mid-line. This means that white now has more pressure on black’s side of the board than black does on white.
Additionally, white’s Bd3 is putting pressure on black’s king. This means that white now has a short-range piece and a long-range piece exerting pressure on back’s kingside.
In contrast, black has no pieces pressuring anything on white’s side.
To be clear, the situation is not yet urgent. Both Bxh7+ and Nxf7 are over-protected. But! If our knight ever leaves f6, then the king is the lone defender of h7. Ditto for Rf8 and the f7 square. To make matters worse, white’s queen can come to f3 and white’s d2 knight can come to f3-g5, adding more pressure in the future.
Because of all of this, it’s in the ‘spirit’ of the position for black to either find a way to create lasting pressure on one of white’s weaknesses or alleviate the pressure white is building up. Here, I’m struggling to find ways to hit the kingside, and threats on the queenside like 8…Qb6 are easily met by 9. Qc2 further pressuring h7, while we lack other pieces to pile on b2. That’s why the best move is 8…Nd7:
What’s so funny about this move is it breaks several opening principles: the knight was already developed on f6, it is less central now on d7, and the LSB lacks a square to move to now. But, by preparing to push f6 and oust the knight, or push f5 and restrict white’s bishop, and also by offering trades of pieces, we are responding to the fact that white has managed to exert early pressure. We are saying that shutting down their lines of attack first will allow us to find more active plans later, since any superficial developing moves now do not respond to or counter white’s pressure in any meaningful way. All of this is often talked about as ‘feeling’ but did boil down to a few simple questions over whose pieces were exerting more coordinated pressure.
Let’s contrast this with another position
Here, both Ne4 and Ng4 are reasonable moves for black to try and gain some central space and counterplay. But let’s just talk about why a retreating move like Ng8, preparing to re-route to e7 and keep control of d5, is horribly out of touch with the position:
Quite simply, white will continue to exert pressure on f7 before the knight can re-enter the game. This is just a simple example of when a quiet, retreating move is not in the spirit of the position. In contrast, a knight on e4 could eye f2 after black castles and pushes f6 or d6.
Here’s a totes different example:
This is the Breyer variation of the closed ruy lopez. Unprompted, black glosses over the blocked-in Be7, the un-moved Bc8, and retreats their most central piece from a square where it exerted pressure on d4 to its starting square. What in the world? Why is this an incredibly GM-approved line?
Well, considering the spirit of the position:
Black was unable to stop white from pushing d4, so Nc6 was only superficial ‘controlling’ d4. In contrast, we can now push c5 to counter d4 and keep tension in the center
In contrast to the previous position, white lacks the open lines needed to create a massive kingside attack, with only the Bb3 exerting pressure on f7, and Ng5 being easily refuted by an h6 kick-away. So time is not of the essence
What matters much more, instead, is that pieces end up on useful squares. Black realizes that the knight could re-rout to d7 and f8, or take the other knight’s place on f6, keeping an eye on the undefended e4 pawn as well as adding another attacker to the kingside.
All in all, what we’re seeing is that whether these surprising, seemingly principle-breaking retreating moves are acceptable, brilliant, or horrible has a lot to do with our ‘read’ of the board. To recap: reading the board involved asking the following questions
Whose pieces *are* exerting more pressure? Have any short ranged pieces like knights (or pawns) crossed the midline? Which long-range pieces are pointed at the king or other weaknesses?
Whose pieces *can* more easily coordinate on those pressure points? Whose pieces will be tied down to defending those points?
Are there lots of open lines on the board for pieces to quickly coordinate, or is the center more closed up?
This is over-simplified, of course, but we can appreciate that we’re a lot more inclined to retreat in order to exchange or close the board when we see that they have pressure and we don’t. When we have ways to exert our own counter-pressure, especially on open boards, retreating is a death wish. And when pieces lack enough open lines to coordinate, slower moves focusing on ideal positioning rather than quick, superficial development, can be critical.
All of this takes a ton of time, practice, and patience. But my hope is that, after reading this, we’ll all be a little bit less inclined to play an automatic Bd7 or Re8 without at least trying to get a ‘feel’ for the board first.
Best
JJ
ps as always you can book lessons with me here bit.ly/JJLangChess