How to WIN Closed Chess Positions!

ladies and gentlemen in today's video we are going to cover a subject that plagues many chess players in a subject that many of you have requested a video on and that is closed positions close positions in chess are one ones where both players have both maybe eight pawns on the board each or seven or six and the position therefore has two fences built up and it's very difficult to maneuver and i'm going to use certain terms in this video before we jump into the examples terms like pawn breaks space advantage sacrifices and we're going to implement those in in every example that i'm going to show you time stamps are on the video player uh and we're just gonna learn it's gonna be great uh we're gonna have a great time so first i'm gonna show you three games that my viewers my subscribers submitted uh and we're going to start introducing these concepts then we're going to look at master level so there's going to be the next timestamp which is grand masters and then we're going to talk a little bit about different openings that come with a closed nature so uh knight to f3 this is a game my subscribers with the black pieces named adam we can actually look at it from adam's perspective both players rated about a thousand uh the game begins with a with a relatively standard opening white is playing a king's indian attack and black is playing uh whatever black is playing it's not actually super clear black is actually playing the regular development but blunder upon on move 8 opening which is exactly what occurs obviously i can complain about that but you're 900 this is what's going to happen uh it would have been a little bit better not to do this but okay now this is the beginning of our lesson uh so so this position obviously would be nicer for black if black had all 8 pawns but black does not but fine it's a position where black has more space what the heck does that mean well you see most of white's pawns are obviously on the third rank so they're not on the fourth rank black meanwhile actually has a little bit more uh control of the middle of the board and the transfer points which can then kind of lead to the opponent's position a little bit more development um a player who has many many pawns on the sixth rank and not really engaging in the center line means that uh they are lacking space but those positions are very prickly so those positions are not super easy to break through um and for for this example and for all future examples we're going to be focusing on pawn breaks so a pawn break is a spot on the board where a pawn trait can occur and therefore lead to uh opening of lines or infiltration of pieces and different a different vision of different pieces opening up but also piece maneuvers okay so let's see how adam handles this position adam plays queen to d7 with the intention to maybe go in here i like that all right adam finds him finds him himself an opening black plays uh white plays d4 uh which leads to this check and kind of like a little barrier f3 is not a great move but we have bishop h3 looking to trade and infiltrate and we have the following position now this is a fantastic move you see a weakness you use your open line in close positions you're gonna have open lines right you need to go create an attack okay now what so if you start looking at any close positions pawn breaks you're obviously looking at moves like c5 uh and the move c5 doesn't do you a whole lot right now if anything it just loses a pawn uh but maybe it softens up the structure now you start looking at your pieces where can i locate in the enemy territory and infiltration point you don't have one you actually straight up do not have one none of your pieces can access any of those squares so in positions like this what you want to do is take as much space as possible and just continue to stockpile pressure on weak spots if you can identify them if you can't sometimes that happens positions like this with white are like hedgehogs very difficult to get close and poke at them but i like f5 now however now we have mobility this move f4 weakened these two squares dramatically and you can't put your bishop there but you can put this knight you see this knight right now cannot move forward at all in many close positions the knight is the golden piece it can be rerouted and in close positions you can take as much time as necessary sometimes to reroute a piece to a better square so something like bishop b6 like you see in this game you see both sides need to think about where their knight would be the best like white's knight would be best there supported by right these pawns black goes for a pawn break but white is so solid white doesn't have to do anything about the pawn break what i would have loved to see here is something like knight h8 actually for a while now i would have left the c98 i would have left to see knight h8 here knight f7 knight d6 and knight to e4 planting that knight on the e4 square and then that could lead to potential attacks in the future right when you have more space you're going to hear me say this a lot when you have more space in close positions you can attack especially the king right so what ends up happening in the game queen e7 uh there's some maneuvering you know black pawn trades but not in a great way they open up the file but white meets them right there the queen goes for a little journey the queen should never be leading the attack because the queen can't do anything by herself we have some weird tactics here queens rooks get traded and actually black does create a little bit of hope for themselves by but white is just right there so white stops everything and uh obviously we have some tactics later on but um it ends up with uh adam blundering mate adam didn't know what to do anymore with the bishop of the rook so he went for a king hike and got made it boom so you lose a game like this what could adam have done better uh adam could have obviously not blundered upon in the opening but that was really the only mistake the queen should never be doing the battle but this knight was the offside piece for the for most of the game find that reroute continue to pressure the weakness sometimes the pawn break is not gonna work um let's look at two games which actually had extremely similar structures two fifteen hundreds fifteen sixteen hundreds london right so sometimes this kind of pawn structure comes out of a karo khan which we're gonna see in the very next game and we're gonna see in this position not a situation like last game where one person had a lack of space the players are on equal footing here they have pretty equal space they're both in the middle of the board so um black does this black plays this move c4 and sometimes this happens in london's or carl khan's so you're going to play where you have more space okay you're going to play where you have more space white should be trying to create an attack on the king or white should be trying because they have more space here to break in the center so this is a very common break in the london to try to play like for e5 and as long as you're protecting this infiltration spot you're going to be able to push these pieces back and as i said as i said you know the player that has more space on the side of the board moves like h4 and all of a sudden greek gifts become possible out of nowhere because you know you didn't castle knight g5 hg boom boom like because you have so much more space it's very difficult for the black pieces like the knights and the bishop to actually do anything because you have more space that way right whereas whitis is suffering a little bit on the queen side but black doesn't have as many pieces attacking right so this kind of a structure uh white should be focusing their play where they have more space either pawn breaking in the middle or over here this is not what white wants b4 can lead to disaster and now an a4 b4 now black has been let in and white castle so white is not pawn breaking or doing anything so black continues to march in and now white is really suffocating over there and if black can prevent the king side attack black is going to be completely fine i don't actually know the overall result of this game white did end up going uh for some sort of attack but completely in the wrong way uh you're not supposed to attack with just a queen and a bishop the queen should never be leading the charge in a closed position right i just said that so we see another example of this and this knight is probably going to rear out and go in this pawn and that's exactly what happens and by the time white is marching with the pawns it's too late you just you took too long so now you're collapsing on this side of the board you see how all of this makes sense now you have to be quick in close positions you can't maneuver and go oh well they're attacking me now i'm going to attack them um i like what white did here but it took white way too long now see you see white is doing all the all the right breaks and actually getting somewhere at this point white is actually better because black misplayed but now white has to play g5 knight g4 knight f6 but white goes backwards i mean that's just right you need to play where you have more space you have to use pawns as openings for other pieces bishops knights white ended up uh getting you know crushed on the queen side moves like a3 and then rook a3 and that's it i mean by the time white got anything going on the king side uh white was brutally hunted down and if some while later the b-pawn actually promoted and became a queen so you can see it's going to be one queen uh that does occur later in the game and by the end of the game white has only four pawns in a king versus an entire army very very tragic stuff so this game that i'd like to show you between uh kalkabur uh and a person named noderbeck who named themselves after the uh the superstar from um from the world rapid and blitz uh this was a karo khan and this was a karo khan folks you're going to recognize this pawn structure you recognize this pawn structure from the last game very similar right uh this one uh calculator did not mess around uh calculate look at this look at this sidestepping with the queen before castling and then playing for f4 f5 and even though black got the same attack that black got in the last game the difference here the difference here is that white is fast white is fast with the counter play and led a devastating attack but you know what this is still too much you still should not allow all of this probably the best thing for white to have done when a4 was played was play a move like i don't know castles you know something like castles and then if b3 comes don't take just just chill just chill for a moment and you know what would be a dream come true for white to play a3 because now white completely stops the pawn attack and we'll just play f5 in a moment and only white is playing with the attack right but i told you about sacrifices right we've talked about sacrifices which is breaking through a blockade of pawns as well in close positions i mentioned that in the introduction so this game again we're playing where we have more space uh and uh but but white is still making this a little bit unnecessarily dangerous so you have to understand in close positions where the pawn breaks for the opponent are going to happen as well stop their counter play and go on counter play of your own successfully however however calcu made it work uh despite sacrificing seemingly the entire house over there he managed to i mean black just blockaded their own pawns so black did not play this correctly it would have been better for black to play uh you know to actually understand that the attack on the king side is very real to finish the development but black just didn't do that black instead got their pawns blockaded which is not what you want to happen uh and uh yeah well look at this i mean they got their king hunted into the open and uh and actually uh god got mated like on the side of the board a little bit later so the king just got brutally brutally hunted and it was made this was was walking through fire but what really helped white here was the fact that black played with no bishop and rook so if you play with no bishop and rook it's probably a good chance you're gonna lose uh but uh again if we stop this attack a little bit earlier than it got going or we don't allow our opponent to infiltrate and get to our base of our operations here and take everything you're going to have a little bit of an easier time so pawn structures overlap this was a slightly better thing than what we saw last game right uh black playing full on on on on one side of the board with with key pawn breaks and infiltrating and targeting weakness isolating a pawn and then winning it and continuing to break through and white in this game went on a more successful attack because if he hadn't done anything he would have just got completely overrun but that's like viewer games right and there's many many different openings that lead to close positions we're going to look at that later but for now let's take a look at um let's take a look at some master games so we've got three master games for you uh one of the openings that leads to one of the most close positions in all of chess is the king's indian defense uh this is a game between tigran petrecian not the recent one with some drama behind him but the legend uh from the from the uh from armenia soviet union back in the day soviet ties uh one of the greatest players of his generation and arguably of all time versus some guy named sam i don't know samuel schreiber might have been a very strong player but i but this is a very instructive game from 1962 and you see the center immediately closed so where are the pawn breaks where are the pawn breaks where does white have more space the queen side so in the king's indian defense black attacks here white attacks on the queen side very standard right so black tries to break a little bit not right away just kind of asking white what's going to happen in the middle of the board here betraysian here plays h4 because he wants to do something on the king's side to force black's hand and he knows that in the future black is going to play f5 f5 is going to be supported by the g pawn right and the bishop and the rook but what he does is he he he tickles with this move and if black takes then you open up the h file so black decides to keep the it all closed but now f5 loses its power because petraecian plays f3 and g4 so now by splitting the pawns f5 is impossible because you have two pawns controlling that square so he splits those pawns away from black black will now no longer successfully play f5 and he has more space on every side of the board he has more space on the king side more space on the queen side so there's no pawn breaks black has no pawn breaks so what do you do in a position with less pawn breaks we already talked about this targeting a weakness but white has no weaknesses so white has no weaknesses okay so if white has no weaknesses we just have to rear out our pieces okay how okay we're trying to take a little bit of space petraecian meets us right there trying to mess with us a little bit and that's it i mean black has no more pawn mobility the only thing that black can do is begin transferring the pieces to the queen side because black is dead on the king side like completely positionally dead and the game will be decided probably in this area of the board right unless white somehow gets a knight to f5 like knight e2 knight g3 knight of five that's the kind of stuff you need to visualize so i i urge you to look at some master games and and visualize where your knights can jump where your bishops want to go where the pawn breaks are for both players right there's no pawn breaks but white has the only space advantage of the game and that's the key move knight c5 here is black's attempt at beginning an operation of rerouting to the queen side and petracian takes the knight because the more pawns there are on the board for both sides the bishops become weaker the more pawns the bishops are weaker it's the knights that are million dollar pieces and here's the million dollar move here as far as i'm concerned um black is about to play knight e8 knight d6 to reroute the knight right 98 or knight d7 and try to come over here so here he plays this move this is the this is the all-star move because it looks useless but the point is you're going to take the knight when it arrives and if bishop d7 i mean maybe you'll take as well and you'll put your knight on c4 um but you're gonna see this look he just takes he just takes the knight right away because he understands that bishops won't do a damn thing here they won't do a damn thing all pawn mobility is dead he plays knight c4 he plays queen b3 how was black ever going to do anything nothing that's it the game is over like black can resign here but the game goes on a little bit longer obviously uh there's still a little bit here and i talk about this sometimes you know sacrificing to break through you're not going to sacrifice anything like just just so you understand if black sacrifice is here you're just down a piece so you're not actually breaking through every criteria i've mentioned here you lose you cannot maneuver your pieces you have no weaknesses you can target you have no pawn breaks this is a worst nightmare position for a player trying to break out and it ends i mean very slowly but uh white white goes on to win i mean that's it black has nothing so black loses in all the categories of close positions here right this is a fantastic example of of negating the opponent's pawn breaks to the maximum ability uh to use pawn breaks of your own like a4 right a4 such an important move to target that pawn to be like what are you doing you take me or you push beautiful game absolutely beautiful game and i mean there's so many more pawn structure master classes you can watch uh here's a great game between uh hui fun and amin tabatabe from several years ago hoifan obviously was the women's world champion tabata base is a very strong gm now he wasn't a gm in this game but this is from a nimso indian a hubner variation not the most important thing for the opening but you're about to see ah you see we have a makings of a closed center so here is like a very close center so a lot of peace maneuvering is going to happen uh pawn breaks for for um and open files you know obviously this open file maybe this pawn break over here maybe this weakness uh but the most of the jostling is gonna happen in this side of the board it's gonna be between the knights it's gonna be between the pawns uh white is trying to maybe set up this pawn break oh he fun is he's trying to set up her own right now white plays g4 so g4 is preventing f5 but drastically weakening the dark squares right potentially weakening the dark squares so what does she do she goes to win the battle on the dark squares uh knight to e3 and now h5 h5 is a very interesting move if you take f5 becomes juicy so f5 will become a possibility in the future even at the cost of a pawn and um look at this look at this look at this dark square battle here with the knights uh sacrificing temporarily her own to give a check um but again she's she's playing on that she's playing on the openings and the dark squares of the position and look at white's structure and actually what you're gonna see a little bit later here um the heck was that just.com just like jumped backwards it didn't want me to keep going uh what you're gonna see a little bit later here is um look at this a total shutdown of white's pawn breaks just like white just can't move all five pawns so the person with more pawn mobility is going to be happier white tries to break out look at this savage move e4 oh it's a bishop's worst nightmare they're just completely boxed in by their own pieces so the open files here are going to be the difference and the maneuvering right so we see ho ifan she's playing on the open lines now she starts collecting so sometimes when you just have a winning position like this you just collect you start collecting all the pawns because they're so weak and then you're gonna make the right trades notice how this knight has just hung around the entire game right so she she uses the opponents uh overextending against them wins the battle on the dark squares and she didn't really have to do a whole lot but most of this came after g4 i've had games in these kinds of structures let's just say hypothetically where i go for a pawn break right something like this and uh you can take with a knight probably uh you can probably take with the bishop i mean i've i've kind of done both and you get a position like like so and that pawn break now gives you new opportunities right that pawn break gives you opportunities to target the queen side because pieces got lost so this is a little bit destabilized but it also gives you opportunities to take space and bring your rook and maybe attack so pawn breaks give you these opportunities but you have to be focused and you have to play where you're stronger like you can't play f5 boop like i don't know for example you can't play a five and then uh and then i'm just gonna make a random move and then switch your whole plan to play for b5 you just you can't really do that like i would not recommend playing like that you need to try to stay focused one step at a time in a close position because you you have that luxury um the last master game is obviously this completely insane game uh between uh demchinko and duda i'm not gonna i talked about this uh i talked about this in a recent video so i'm not gonna revisit it but uh this game was super locked and it resembled the king's indian defense but it was actually from e45 so we can already see what's happening right we can see that black is gonna try to attack here and white is going to try to attack here that's what's going to happen uh and and it led to in a completely insane game where one guy afforded the luxury of literally walking his king to the other side of the board because that's how close it was but when you have more space we've talked about this already today that is where your advantage lies so you can either attack a king or attack a side of the board i don't see a black king anywhere here so what is white doing attacking that side right well white completely runs away with the king so the king is going to be safe from the incoming assault on this side of the board but what white is gonna do when you have such overwhelming space advantage you can sack to promote so you can afford yourself the luxury of maneuvering forever and ever and at some point while black is trying to break through you see this he sacks his knight instant replay he sacks his knight and now he has a position like this so it's not it's not always an attack on a king in a totally locked position it's also the fact that you know your pawns are going to be difference makers this game between duda and demchenko was completely nuts i made a video on it recently um and obviously it's a very crazy example where a guy walks his king up the entire side of the board and actually ends up with three queens but the point stands um the point stands that you you know you shouldn't fear close positions and uh and you need to play to your to your spatial advantage and sometimes sacrifice is required but i don't want to advocate too much sacrificing because you know my average viewer is not 27.50 so they can do it but if you sack your pieces you might just end up down pieces so but sacrificing to break through a closed structure is kind of like the the last uh the last thing um and last but not least like conceptually overall for everything i just wanted to have a quick segment on understanding the the structure and balances of your opening so what the heck am i talking about well obviously we've seen the king's indian defense so if you're playing a king's indian uh which is can lead to you know relatively balanced and close structure something like this you have to understand what the hell you're doing here you have to understand in a closed center okay i'm supposed to put my knight on c5 so let's say something just very very simple like knight c5 to understand like how to keep a knight there you have this the reason you play a5 with black is so white can't kick you out i talked about this if you allow white to take space on the queen side and the king's indian and boo you from the middle white is just winning i mean white just has too much space so white is going to just advance on that side of the board that's you have to understand the opening that you're that you're kind of playing there's many many many games look at the game hikaru nakamura beat boris gelfand one of my uh most viewed videos how hikaru launched just an insane assault of pawns on the king side in the king's indian defense so that is like a king's indian you have to understand how to play that opening um in in semi-closed positions so let's say a benoni so let's say d4 knight f6 c4 c5 this is not as closed because we traded a pawn so it's kind of close but not not really right so you have to understand how to play this position well black is going to try to castle and obviously put put some pressure on the e file right because because that's that's black's target white is going to try to restrict the development of the light squared bishop with moves like h3 and these pawns in the middle black is going to try to play a6 and b5 so to prevent that you play a4 and that's how you jostle black is going to try to make a little pond lever to infiltrate with the pieces every opening has its own flavor and if you if you completely don't understand that if you're just you know oh every time they play e4 with with black i'm playing c6 boom we have to understand that in the karo khan uh in the advanced variation you have breaks of c c5 and f6 the same for the french defense so in the french defense you have this right and you have this and this and at some point one of them is good and at some point one of them is not so good and this applies to all openings if you cannot answer the question of pawn structure and cl and and how your position can close from an opening that you're playing you're missing an entire component of the opening which is something that you build up over time experience courses as you build your expertise in chess so um yeah i i this is a subject that i can make a video on for like three hours to be honest i mean people make paid courses on on on closed positions but for today what i want you to uh to to kind of keep the most in mind as we saw in some of the earlier examples that we were looking at who has more space in a closed position is it is it a position where where one individual has uh more space than the other either in the middle or on the left side or on the right side where is the spatial advantage and how can you take advantage of it understand that when you're playing against the spikey hedgehog you might need to be a bit more patient take as much space as possible don't lose center pawns right make the correct advancement into the middle or else you're going to get hit with a spiky little point trade the pieces in the right way re-routes like we saw later in this game and throughout this video rerouting in closed positions taking your time finding oh my knight is trash i should reroute it in an advantageous way so it's not stuck on the edge of the board forever right pawn breaking at the right moment and trying to exploit don't let the queen be the one do the doing the battle in close positions that's very rarely what you want to do and understanding your opponent's counter play like understanding that this is a very serious thing and if you can't defend your pawns the breakthrough is going to be very fatal potentially um sacrifices at the necessary moments uh and uh it that's that's basically it i mean it's it's those three kind of major concepts of uh who's got the most space playing on the side that you have the most space and creating the correct attack whether it's on a king or on a side of the board to a future breakthrough in an end game uh or or or rerouting pieces that are not particularly great and inducing weak squares taking advantage of weak squares and positions where you can plant a piece and go forward and based on your own games i would say that any position with six seven or eight pawns is closed five pawns each that's already like almost half the pawns gun so it's very difficult to get a close position like that but i hope this helps i hope this points you in the right direction it's very tough to make a video that's like 30 minutes long or more and try to keep your attention for the entire time i hope with all of those examples uh we uh we did kind of a good job if you're feeling like you're still not not quite there there are many other kind of videos uh out here on youtube or or paid or or otherwise but i hope that this is a good introduction and if you want to kind of dig around more in the sandbox you kind of can find kind of find your way but this concept definitely needs to be addressed and i hope this helps so appreciate you all very much if there's any other concepts out there you're struggling with do let me know in the comments and i'll make a video i'll see you in the next one get out of here

Channel: GothamChess

Views: 326,027

Keywords: gothamchess, gothamchess london, gothamchess caro kann, gothamchess openings, gothamchess vienna, closed positions chess, closed positions, closed positions chess middlegames

Id: o7M24gcivnw

Length: 26min 57sec (1617 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022