KIMPLODES! Explosive Analysis Approach--Break it up, baby!
KIMPLODES! is an acronym to guide you through the process of analyzing a chess game.
My proposition: I believe it enhances one's ability to evaluate and analyze if you have a systematic way to consider all individual aspects of a position. In a series of eleven blogs I offer my systemic approach for your consideration. But remember, everything you do in chess should be tailored to your individual strengths, weaknesses and preferences.
KIMPLODES!
"Kimplodes?"
"No. It's KIMPLODES!"
"Ok, boomer, with your fixation on punctuation and formatting. But what is it?
A. A person named Kim who is about to have a mental meltdown.
B. An acronym that may provide an analytic assist to some portions of the chess community.
C. An animated series about a teenage girl who fights crime while still dealing with all the social issues of school.
D. Probably one of the above, but I'm not sure which yet as you haven't said what it means!"
This is the beginning of a short series that breaks an analytic methodology, KIMPLODES, into piece parts. I offer some clear areas to focus on when analyzing a game, both during play and afterwards...whether your own games or those of others. KIMPLODES offers a structured way to think about any chess game. It may offer a way to think during a game so that you save time and consider the most salient aspects of any position. In post-game analysis it provides a way to evaluate each KIMPLODES factor and then determine which factors were most important, so that in the future you are more likely to recognize the key features in a game while playing.
The underlying concept behind KIMPLODES is not original to me, but I offer a different slant on items penned in a Dana Mackenzie article (May 2008, CL&R), who was building on precepts espoused by IM Jeremy Silman. Why "repeat" their efforts? I hope it's not repetition but offers some additional insights. For starters, I shuffled and revised Dana's acronym (IMPLODe-K) because I find KIMPLODES easier to remember. Besides, every game ultimately revolves around the King. If His Majesty is unsafe, then many other factors (particularly Material) lose in importance. So, I think that King safety should be considered first and foremost. Also, I made the "e" upper case and added a category. Plus, my blog series accounts for recent tournament play and computer advances since 2008.
I should note that when I first encountered a variant of this approach it made my head explode🤯. At the time I was too busy during my games trying to create threats. I didn't think I had time to use a somewhat structured approach to think about any position, let alone both sides of a position, and only then make a move. Then I got better and realized I was doing some of these things anyway🫣. Not all of them. And not necessarily well. But it certainly gave me something to think about. And gradually I incorporated more and more aspects of KIMPLODES into my play. And post-game analysis. Until it was second nature. Like sneezing when suddenly exposed to a bright light.
Okay, but what does KIMPLODES stand for?
K - King Safety: Always a good place to start since he who is mated last, wins first. Huh? Oh, okay, that makes sense...beat the other guy to the punch and bloody up his King, IF it can be done. Otherwise, find something else to do! There are ways to win besides blindly chasing the other player's King.
I - Initiative: One of those "mysterious" concepts, but usually you recognize it when you see it...? Ez for me to say 
. And not as hard to write about as I thought it might be.
M - Material: Ah, this is easy. Am I ahead or behind in material? The harder question is whether it matters, because sometimes even a Queen doesn't mean anything. The simplest example might be a smothered mate where the side delivering mate first sacrificed a Queen. A frustrating example would be a stalemate or perpetual check by a side with vastly inferior quantities of Material. Well, frustrating for the person ahead in Material. The most inconvenient example is a draw when your opponent has no Material, but you have no time…on the clock. We see that outcome represented on the scales to the left, picture courtesy of Monam @ pixabay.com.
P - Pawn structure: All the standard issues: isolanis; doubled, nay tripled, pawns; pawn chains; pawn islands; passed pawns; central and wing pawns; and so forth and so on. Ad nauseum.
L - Lines: Files and ranks for the Rook, diagonals for the Bishop and all of those for Her Majesty, aka She Who Shall Not be Named. Hogs 🐽🐽rooting on the 7th can be especially devastating.
O - Officers: The minor pieces. Who has the better Bishops and Knights. This is frequently tied directly to Pawn Structure and who has better access to Lines and Key Squares or Outposts. Plus, whether the Officers can target certain pawns.
D - Development: At bare minimum, a three-part question. The first, and simplest, is who has more pieces developed. The second asks whether the pieces are developed harmoniously, i.e., they support a plan of action. The third asks whether one side has a lead in development in a particular sector. That is, does one side have more pieces available for activity on one side of the board, and the opponent can't muster up good defenses?
In the original articles "De" was used to depict Development. I broke it up into two categories as a more universal approach.
Energy: At the lowest level you can think of the tension on a compressed spring and the forces generated when that tension is released. Mentally imagine your chess prowess moving from an old-school watch spring to commercial-grade pyrotechnics. The ultimate goal? You are able to unleash fission or fusion on the board as your pieces spring from behind their lines to overwhelm the enemy. This directly acknowledges the theoretical and practical contributions of players, such as GM Suba, regarding the hidden energy of positions found in the Pirc, the Rat🐭, hedgehog🦔 structures, the Hippopotamus🦛, and so on. (Picture of nuclear explosion from wikipedia.com.)
S - Squares/Space: This is often tied to Pawn Structure but shifts the focus and is more complex in some sense. Oversimplified, extra space offers that side more maneuver room for pieces. However, approaches such as hedgehog defenses prove that sometimes the owner of the side with less space have tremendous latent Energy; just waiting to explode if the side with more space lets up for an instant. And Squares acknowledges that often a lot of energy is focused around controlling either one Square or a set of Squares.
Well, okay...but how do I add them all up?
Oof...good question. Was hoping you would not ask. I've been doing this so long that it's fairly automatic and I just munge them together to decide what are the truly critical aspects in a given position. Do I need to open Lines, are the Kings safe, should the Pawn Structure be changed, do my opponents pieces appear ready to bust loose and ruin my day, etc.? And then I determine how to address those most critical factors. You can find an example of how I now use KIMPLODES to analyze in the next major section where I examine a rather famous game using KIMPLODES terminology to describe the events.
But how did I initially add things up? Very clumsily, even downright awkward. Not recommended. That said, here's the overly convoluted approach I first took when developing KIMPLODeS (the acronym started out with a lower case "e"). For each factor I assigned a score of +-, +/-, +/=, =, =/+, -/+, -+ and sometimes just unclear ∞. The standard assessments we see all the time in annotated games and chess engine analyses. But those annotations occur at the overall level, not broken into parts. But if you take a cubist's mentality (Cézanne, Duchamp, Picasso, ...) then you quickly discern that the overall assessment actually consists of some aggregation of many elements. And the sum of the parts can obscure important truths. For instance, grossly oversimplified just like me, it is possible to look at a position where one side, let's say White, is completely winning in terms of Material (+-), but the actual value of that Material is irrelevant because Black just demonstrated that King Safey was the only relevant factor by delivering mate! And mate is ultimately the only +- or -+ that matters.
Of course, there is the confounding factor that in some cases an assessment is unclear ∞. Personally, I find that an unclear assessment at the aggregate level can be quite confusing. What exactly does unclear mean in that case? My simple mind finds it easier to determine which individual KIMPLODES elements are unclear. And then decide if that matters or can be ignored for the moment. If, for instance, it is unclear to me which side has the better Officers (Bishops and Knights as a refresher), then perhaps I need to spend some time thinking how to change that assessment. Particularly if an exchange of some of the minor pieces is an option currently on the board.
Truth to tell, and with the benefit of hindsight and growth as a chessplayer and analyst, that symbology approach is far too complex and certainly something I would not advise during a game. Who has the bandwidth to juggle all those symbols when there are important things happening on the board?
A reasonable simplification for adding things up: Just assess each factor as a thumbs up, thumbs down, equal or WTF is going on here. If you have a "WTF" on the board, that probably takes priority! Ignoring WTFs for the moment, you can subjectively "add" the factors together. Or you can determine what you want to do based on which elements you deemed most important in a given position. This requires practice, practice, practice (blah, blah, blah...you've heard it before, and it's still true). It's up to you to determine if the benefit is worth the investment in time.
The ultimate/best solution for adding things up: Come up with something that works best for you. My approaches are merely suggestions. Again, I believe it enhances one's ability to evaluate if you have a systematic way to consider all individual aspects of a position. But everything you do in chess should be tailored to your individual strengths, weaknesses and preferences.
Sample Game with KIMPLODES Analysis
Let's look at a game that allows us to quickly examine many facets of a KIMPLODES analysis.
"A Night at the Opera". Picture of Sydney Opera House by pattyjensen on pixabay.com
For your viewing pleasure, and an introduction to several aspects of KIMPLODES, a classic served by none other than Paul Morphy. He demonstrates why Development and Initiative can rule the day, overwhelming Material concerns by opening Lines and destroying any sense of King Safety for Black. This game demonstrates why I place King Safety at the top of the analysis tree--if your King is unsafe (meaning the other player has credible threats that are far stronger than any threat you can pose), then nothing else matters in the immediate term. Morphy uses Development to pursue an Initiative. His Officers rapidly become better than their counterparts, and Morphy conquers all the important Lines. Then he demonstrates that Material doesn't matter if the enemy King is endangered. Consequently, you can sacrifice scads of material happily.
