How To Spot "Hidden" Tactics In Your Games - Tricky Chess Tactics Lesson

hey guys so i just played a game that had this position right here black played bishop to b4 against me and i actually missed the move that i should have played and i think this is a really good learning opportunity it's kind of shows how tactical ideas can pop up out of nowhere and you really have to be ready for them or you will miss them like i did in this game now it was a blitz game but i still think there's a lot to be learned here and so i want to break down this game particularly this position and see if you guys can find the correct move but let's go ahead and take a look at this game all right so i played e4 i like to play e4 that's my go-to and d6 so this is the start usually of the piers or the the perk where black will play knight to f6 and i played f4 and if you're wondering why i played this well this is uh one of the lines that i cover in my new course it's an e4 course and i talk about all of the major responses that black has including the piers and there's a bunch of tricky ideas behind playing f4 instead of the standard d4 and so if you're interested in learning more about that check out the course it's on sale from now through july 4th link is in the description i put a ton of time and effort into that and like i said you'll get a lot more details on why i played f4 now my opponent didn't play the main move they played this really weird c6 which is like almost never played almost everybody plays knight to f6 but they played c6 i didn't worry about it i continued developing and now we kind of get into a little bit more of a standard position once the knight comes out bishop g4 bishop to e2 played d4 i'm just taking control of the center no reason to to not do that since black is letting me and they gave up the bishop right away which i'm happy about generally speaking the bishop pair is a slight advantage and so i'm happy and it's a nice place for my bishop it's really controlling uh the center controlling this diagonal dominating the knight here and so i'm pretty happy about this position already e5 i castled i wanted to get the king out of the center especially since we're starting to get ready to trade some things you don't want your king to get stuck in the center so castles right away king to h1 sometimes beginners find this move kind of confusing it's like why are we just moving a king over well it has to do with the you know we're kind of being proactive right i can just envision at some point in the future this being a problem or even this being a problem and very simple example here if imagine if i were to let's just say take this and play some random move and black takes here right and i'm like okay let me take my pawn back boom guess what i just lost my queen right just a quick example of how that can happen and i'm sure a lot of beginners have fallen for something like that and so what a lot of stronger players do before we even get to something like that it's like you know what let's just get the king to a safe square there's no more threats along the diagonal there's no way that i can even be put in check anytime soon my king is totally safe it eliminates a lot of the tactics along this diagonal all right so queen to c7 i traded here and i played d5 now this is kind of a good moment i think to talk about because sometimes people have a hard time knowing what to do when there's this pawn tension right it's like i could take this way i could take this away i could leave it i could push how do i know what to do now stockfish says the best thing to just keep developing which when in doubt develop another piece right you can't go wrong with that so if you're not sure play a developing move it's even if it's not the best move it's probably not going to be a bad move okay so that's what you know stockfish says was the best now the reason i wanted to take was number one i liked the fact that i opened up my rook so now my rook's involved once this bishop moves the rook is going to be putting some pressure on some things so that seemed like a good idea to me now you could say the downside to trading here is that it does free up black's bishop a little bit so that's kind of a trade-off but i decided you know i was okay with that and then i played d5 and one of the things that i was thinking about here is that if i take here it looks like black's knight is very very strong now on e5 right like that's it's already supported i have no pawns that can make it move yes i can play bishop to f4 but i mean black can probably just defend it and i don't know it just looks like a really strong and annoying knight and on top of that i now have an isolated e pawn which is long long term is going to be a weakness right isolated pawns generally are weaknesses and so i said you know what instead of doing that instead of giving black the strong knight and giving myself an isolated pawn let's push by gain some space and if black takes me i have a couple of options but i was probably just going to take here i have this really annoying pawn which is not isolated right in the future if i need to i can support it and get a pawn chain going and you know it just seemed like it made more sense so that's why i decided to push in this position so black castle the queen side and i took it and you know i just kind of said well since the king is here like why not take and start to open up the king if black takes with a pawn that looks like this is going to be a weakness isolated pawns right and so i figured black would take with the queen which they did but now still the king is somewhat open okay so bishop to e3 finishing my development knight to b6 there's an attack on my queen so i have to move by the way i should mention i was paying attention to this earlier like when i played bishop e3 i was thinking like do i have to be concerned about this and i noticed that the knight can't move over here the only place that i can really move that makes sense would be here or here and i'm gonna have time to move my queen and you know that's not really a big threat so i wasn't worried about that but definitely something that i needed to consider right so bishop d3 knight to b6 there's the discovered attack and i move my queen now black plays the move bishop to b4 so here we go this is the the position that i really want to focus on and at first glance it looks kind of i would say tame like all right i'm developed my opponent's developed i'm castled my opponent's castle pretty even position right wrong and there's a really nasty move here which i didn't see in the game and i want to give you guys a chance to see if you can find it so i recommend you pause the video here and think through what do you think the best move is um and after you do that we'll talk about it and we'll kind of talk about how you might have been able to find this move in your games all right well if you had a chance to do that uh first of all let me tell you the move that i played was knight to b5 and i said you know there's a fork here so it's a very simple threat but i didn't want to you know let black take here and infiltrate with the queen and potentially mess up my pawn structure and i thought you know this makes sense as a way to create the threat if black tries to kick my knight away well i can still go there and i'm still forking the pieces right so that was kind of my idea i mean i figured black would just play king b8 and i figured the game would go on but what i missed was knight to d5 now i did calculate this but i failed to consider one important detail okay here's what i failed to consider after the trade in my mind i was thinking okay black's gonna take my pawn i could trade and then i could take here or i could maybe take there right away something like this and i thought okay i don't know if that's good for me or not i mean maybe it looks like i'm kind of getting to black's king so i was considering that but i also thought i don't know it looks like black's kind of got some nice central control here with the queen i wasn't sure what was happening okay and so i didn't play it stockfish says first of all yes this is an amazing move but here's one one reason why and we'll come back to some other reasons but one reason why is in that line that i just showed you after i trade here there's a move queen to g4 check which is actually a fork on these pieces now i had no idea until after the game when i was analyzing it i had no idea that this even existed and this just goes to show even in a position like this it looks like there's not really much going on no there's a lot going on there's actually forks that can pop up very easily and so what i want to talk about is how how could i have seen this coming like what should i have been thinking about well you want to always be scanning for the major pieces right if i would have done that i maybe would have said okay the king is open on this diagonal like maybe bishop g4 check could do something i mean it opens up my rook i gotta check with the bishop i don't know or if my bishop happens to move then the queen can go there okay not really sure how that could benefit me but i'm going to keep that in the back of my mind right i'm going to move on what else do i notice about the position well the queen it's lined up with the king but there's no way for my rook to get there so i'm probably going to skip over that the bishop is anything defending the bishop no nothing's defending it that's an important thing to keep in mind right whenever there's undefended pieces when i'm saying undefended pieces i'm specifically talking about these major pieces right that should you know if i remember that along with the fact that this diagonal is here now maybe when i calculate this in my head i can think hold on a second if we do get all these trades oh yeah look at that there's a fork right and i might have saw that um and so you know this is the kind of stuff that you want to keep in mind another thing to point out here is stockfish says let's just say the queen moves back doesn't take c4 and this is is like super strong i have this protected pass pawn right in front of black's king i'm threatening to play like a a3 b4 c5 my bishops are line up it's extremely power plus five for white and i totally didn't realize that this simple move just immediately was winning for me plus three from here but then if black doesn't play extremely accurate it easily turns into plus five plus six so the key takeaway is even in these sort of subtle positions where you might think there's not a lot going on you want to be really thinking through some of those key features diagonals or files that lead to the king undefended pieces and start to put all that together and maybe you'll be able to find moves like knight to d5 right and by the way i should mention we're also attacking some things here like let's just say black decides to you know go back here we've got we could take it a lot of moves we could take here with the bishop we could play c4 the c4 move is really strong doctors really likes this and so this is kind of another idea in the position and by the way i should mention if black tries to take it's a complete blunder for you know the file is here that's one thing it's also just fails tactically to this right but also if they take with the knight again the rook's going to come over and this is just losing for black because of the remember i talked about the king and the queen lined up on that file and i was kind of making a mental note so i probably could have put all that together had i really been a little bit more careful now like i said it was a blitz game so sometimes in blitz you don't really think through it enough but i think this is a really good learning opportunity all right so i'm gonna show you the rest of the game but i think we really you know hopefully learned something from that so i played knight to b5 king to b8 c3 i wanted to kick the bishop away bishop goes back i played a4 just kind of defending we get this trade and now a6 now this is a good moment to pause what do you think i played here all right if you had a chance to pause and think through that if you said knight to a3 you would be wrong because that's kind of the obvious move but the problem with that is now i'm just losing a pawn and i didn't really get anything for it right so what i noticed was that instead of defending what if i counter attack this guy so i played a5 and again i was kind of keeping in the back of my mind you know those diagonals the king threats that i can make and i noticed that hey if i can play a5 and force that knight to move my queen can come in there and that looks like really bad news for black and so that's what led me to play a5 also the fact that i just generally speaking i want to do something aggressive on the king side and and also that knight a3 just look like i'm just losing a pawn and i'm not really getting much for it so i played a5 and uh the idea was that obviously after black takes me i'm gonna take them back now unfortunately the position is a little bit blocked off a little bit more than i would like right and so that's you know that's what going back to 95 why stockfish were saying a9 was so much better now it's just slightly better for black but um at least i do have this annoying pawn on b6 right so rook comes down played queen g5 i was looking for undefended pieces and noticed this guy was undefended and so i took it and i have this fork on these pieces now when my opponent i think thought that they were going to get a really strong attack on g2 which they kind of did the problem was they gave up a piece and also their king is is too exposed their king is in danger here so i actually missed the best move in this position as well if you'd like to pause this is another good opportunity to think through but what do you think the best move is here and why and if you had a chance to look at that there's actually checkmate in six moves here not an easy one but there is checkmate and it's queen takes e5 okay the king's going to try to run in the corner we sacrifice the rook the pawn captures and we play queen c7 and the point is that yes black has a lot of pieces lined up here but there's no checks on my king not a single check and i'm just threatening to go here checkmate and black has no way to stop it well that's not true they can sacrifice their queen but if they don't do that it's just game over so they have to do that we play e5 check the rook can block we take check the queen can block and it's just over so really nice line there i was on the right idea i just missed the um i missed the fact that i didn't have to like do it with checking i could just play queen c7 i guess but what i did instead it was was kind of the same idea i just did it a different way so i took this thinking that i was going to allow this and then come over here now my opponent for some reason played here doesn't change the fact that i still have a win it's mate and three from this position you should be able to figure it out from what i just showed you but if you'd like to pause and if you had a chance to look at that queen to c7 check forces the king over we sacrifice the rook and the point is we we want to lure this pawn away because once the pawn is away the queen can win for checkmate so uh nice game hopefully you learned something like i said the key the key position where there was a ton to be learned was right here after bishop to b4 it looks like a very equal position right and there's so much going on you just have to understand the tactics around knight to d5 so hope you guys um learned something from that and enjoyed it like i said if you want to learn about the system if you're an e4 player i go i go over all of the responses that black can play so e5 e6 d6 d5 c6 c5 and g6 and give you a system that you can play uh similar to this except they're all different systems they're not all like these pawns up but just each one is different and so check out the course it's on sale 20 off through july 4th you have to use the code in the description below there's a link and everything is down there so having said that i'll see you guys real soon probably with a candidate's recap coming up at some point stay sharp play smart take [Music]

Channel: Chess Vibes

Views: 28,088

Keywords: chess, chess vibes, vibes, nelson lopez, nelson, nelsi, checkmate, how to play chess, chest, how to play chest, beginner chess, chess for beginners, how to learn chess, chess tutorial, chess openings, chess endgames, chess endings, chess strategy, chess tactics, chess tricks, chess traps, how to checkmate, how to win at chess, learning chess, board game, chess coach, youtube chess, chess on youtube, chess channel, youtube chess channel, chess for kids, easy chess

Id: 5GKFKsamI6w

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022