Mechanics of Chess Combinations Introduction

MoCC Part 1

I want to share a series of ideas that I've personally assembled during my quest, and a little bit on my philosophical feeling of how chess is largely approached today and I hope the reader will get something from this.

My desire to start this series is due to a discontent where I feel a lot of the development of chess information is clearly not in the direction of how to approach the middle game. At large, it has little to do with how to approaching some unifying ideas which constitute the core of the game, which is arguably the art of calculation.

The combination has been defined many different ways in the past millennium and I will not try to define it here. However in conducting combinative operations, it is clear that it is important not to make a single misstep. This is obvious, however what is less clear are the mechanics and operatives in which how a combination operates.

With the era of computers, we are looking at an ever growing flow of information regarding openings. Databases, books, informants, encyclopedias, or what have you. Even since the golden years of chess, we can see traces of this trend, especially in the players that are largely now highly engaged in copying the trendiest openings but however are incapable of conducting the middlegame properly. The discussion here will not be one of investigation of the positional properties of middlegames, but the tactical operatives which dictate a majority of chess games.

A "little" analysis

Now what I'm going to do in this series isn't to promote any specific methodology or training methods to increase ones calculative abilities. But want is for the reader is to think about how chess operates, and reconsider what they read in chess books, before taking any comments in any chess text at face value. While there is no alternative to hard work, some authors present absolutely ludicrous method, and claim as a "secret" of chess improvement, and this I personally think is unacceptable.

I do not feel anything I present is anything of absolute truth, but in the end, I would like the reader to begin thinking about the process of understanding of combinations, and calculation, which I feel is largely the key skill needed in chess, which I will demonstrate, invariably is examination of chess as a whole, as the ideas permeate openings, middlegames, and endgames.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now consider, that the knight moves in a defined fashion that is known to all chess players. Two squares and one over.

Example 1.1

This is fairly simple, but when we start to consider the indirect power of the knight, its power increases dramatically.

Example 1.2

Now we can consider that besides the original 8 squares that the knight was attacking, the Knight current indirectly controls 10 squares. So adding it together, the mechanism of threat as traditionally known as a fork, allows the knight to control 18 squares, of which some are less obvious to the naked eye.

---Will continue in free time