How to Attack Like Paul Morphy

Any chess player looking to improve his general understanding of chess must, at some point in his life, study the Grandmasters of the past, the people who created the first ideas about the game. In that way, sometimes we can decipher the mind of the grandmaster, learn from his movements and plans, and, of course, implement all these ideas in our next games.

One player we can learn a lot from is Paul Morphy, an American chess player who was considered the greatest chess master of his era. His games were noted for his aggressive beauty, his combinations, and his enormous ability to attack the enemy king.

If you would like to learn how to attack and aggressively dominate in your chess games like Paul Morphy, don’t go anywhere, I’ll teach you.

Ok this is FM Viktor Neustroev and today I am going to show you how to attack like Paul Morphy.

Analyzing many games of this player we can find some characteristics, some patterns that we can also use. One of them is the incredible ability to quickly develop pieces. Morphy created such insane attacks only when he got a major lead in development. The next game is an example of this.

Morphy was so good in his era that he even used to play with handicap against opponents, sometimes giving an extra rook and still crushing his opponents.

The value of the pieces is related to what they are doing, you can have more pieces than your opponent but still be in a bad position because your pieces are not doing anything, something that Morphy knew in depth.

To increase the value of our pieces, we need to coordinate them with others, if two or more than two pieces are putting pressure on the same point on the board, the opponent will be forced to defend. On the contrary, if all the pieces point to different places of the board, we will not achieve a strong attack. This is clearly shown in the next game.

In general, we have emphasized some critical points:

1. Develop your pieces quickly, sometimes you can even sacrifice some pawns or even pieces to achieve it, while you have more pieces DOING something on the board you can create strong attacks.

2. The material doesn't really matter if you don't know how to use it, related to the last point, you can give your opponent an extra rook and he will still be lost in the game if he is playing without it.

3. Coordinate your pieces, try to make them to attack a certain strong point and the opponent will be forced to defend.

In this video you learned how to attack like Paul Morphy. If you can put these simple concepts into practice, you will see a clear improvement during your games. Thanks for watching and make sure you like this video, subscribe to my channel and share it with your friends, chess players.

Feel free to share your games where these concepts were applied and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask in the comment section.

Best Regards,
FM Viktor Neustroev