Monday’s tactics training (Leonid Stein)

With qualification tournaments for the World Cup (to be held later this summer)  taking place all over the world in the form of zonals and continentals, it is a good time for those young masters with aspirations of joining that elite club to remind themselves of the most important qualities necessary for tournament success.

Principal amongst them is just old fashioned common sense: don’t let your guard down even once; try to play the best move each time, and when you can’t do that just play a good move; in difficult positions never give up hope and try to frustrate your opponent on each move.

Next , no doubt, is maintaining sharp analytic skills: often the difference between first place and second place is not what actually took place over the board, but instead what was avoided.   That is, more takes place in the side-lines of any game than in the mainline.  You need to keep working at the board at every move, constantly analyzing and evaluating the pro’s and con’s of each turn.

For this the student needs to practice at home.  Perferably an hour a day or so–depending on his schedule–and what I find works best for me is the use of combinative examples from actual play.

The following positions are from actual games from Leonid Stein’s tournaments.  White is to play and win in each.  The solution can be found by re-playing the actual game with the pgn-viewer.  Good luck!

EVANS

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