Nova Daily - 3 March 2025

Hi!

Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make man happy.

- Siegbert Tarrasch

Any player who's been playing the game of chess for a significant amount of time will be able to say that this is true. Chess has the power to make its players happy. The beauty of rounding off a beautiful attack, of outplaying the opponent, of finding that miraculous escape. Nezhmetdinov's 12.Qxf6 against Chernikov, or seeing the game Serper - Nikolaidis, St Petersburg 1993 for the first time: chess has the power to make us happy.

However, chess also has the power to make people very unhappy. A bad move that ruins a beautiful game can haunt us for days, years, and sometimes a lifetime. And the mouse-slips that people make in bullet chess.

There is an unforgiving and cruel aspect to the game of chess. And it's this aspect that gives everything else meaning. It's called "the truth" and it hides in every game.

Every game of chess can be seen as one step closer to the truth. We can learn something within every game. Whether it means a win or a loss for us is just a matter of perspective: what we learn from the most are mistakes and good examples. That can be chess-wise: you see how a player carries out their technique, or how good positions are lost (pick up Tragicomedies in the Endgame by Mark Dvoretsky or Winning Ugly in Chess by Cyrus Lakdawala for a few howlers). But we can and should also learn something about ourselves, especially if we lose. How do we deal with the defeat? Do we tilt and initiate a long string of bad performances? Do we get frustrated and smash the table in two after a losing streak? Do we know when to go for a breather?

The graceful defeat

Whenever I lose an OTB game, I can usually deal with the loss quite well at that moment. At the very least I don't have to deal with the opponent's hurt feelings over the game. I've made someone else happy, and I'll deal with the self-loathing on my own when I'm back home.

The opposite is also true: I never celebrate my wins right after the game. I can feel happy about the game, but there's always an opponent who might feel awful. I'll save the release for the appropriate moment.

Depending on how the game went, the analysis part can be great fun. As touched upon above, it's often from the losses that we can learn the most.

So I value my losses, but I don't cherish them. Ultimately I'm playing, practicing and analysing them to play better chess next time. Learning requires mistakes, and I make a fair amount of them.

The game

Today's game was a very tense one. The tone was set right at the start of the game when my opponent shot me a message about his state of being. I've included it in the game analysis with his permission.

It was a complex struggle in a Botvinnik English. We both had a few very tough decisions to make. In the end the position was drawn but I lost due to a simple tactical oversight. Those things happen, and at least there's something to be gained from it.

My thoughts:

I had to chuckle afterwards about how dumb the end of the game was for me. But the game was fun. Not exactly correct but fun all the same. And if for nothing better it may have brightened up someone else's day.

Model games:

The only thing that's important for me to realise is that black's opening setup was suboptimal to say the least. White's best bet is to realise that black's opening play is slow, which calls for a quick storm on the kingside.

In the game below, white's much better understanding of the opening came to life properly. Take note at how white kept the tension on the h-file until the circumstances were right to open it up.

What can I take away from this game:

1. The Botvinnik system is very strong against King's Indian setups. The main problems arise for black if they set up a King's Indian indiscriminate of the specific circumstances. The knight manoeuvre through c5 is hardly to be recommended, and white is well equipped to go full-throttle on the kingside with the immediate f2-f4-f5 accompanied by g3-g4. If black is unable to counterbalance this kingside aggression with anything tangible anywhere else on the board, the game tends to be one-sided and might end quickly.
2. The psychology of losing is interesting. It takes a lot of mental strength to handle it with dignity. It's a bad idea to be completely unaffected by them, because that would dampen the motivation to overcome the weaknesses that cause the defeats to happen.
3. Just because someone may come off impertinent in the beginning doesn't mean that that is a defining character trait. They might have had a hard day or suffered a crushing defeat. It happens to all of us; we're only human after all.