An unexamined life is not worth living.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Basic Tactics in the opening

Here is a simple combination that I overlooked in one of my blitz games, but a computer was quick to point out when I ran the game through lichess blundercheck:

DDT-Michael-player, ICC 2015

image White to move (Black just weakened f7 square, so there should be a way to take advantage of that!)
Solution is here: http://en.lichess.org/CgQFr5pf#24

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Searching for Patterns and Combinations using various Chess Software

I already wrote about search in a couple of posts, and these features of ChessBase and Chess Assistant are surprisingly still essentially unchanged and relevant:
Online tactics: Find Sacrifices feature in Chessbase Light
Chess Assistant feature - Search for current pawn structure and material

Since then I found two more interesting search features:

1) SCID has this pawn structure search that I was not aware of:

image

2) Also Chessbase has relatively recently added an ability to search for similar pawn structures

image

Still, you can’t directly search for IQP with Chessbase, and it seems that only Chessbase allows to search for sacrifices (if you are aware of other programs that can do that – please leave a comment!). That’s why we have more than one chess database software …

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