Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess

by Bruce Pandolfini

  ALSO BY BRUCE PANDOLFINI

  The ABCs of Chess

  Beginning Chess

  Bobby Fischer’s Outrageous Chess Moves

  The Chess Doctor

  Chess Openings: Traps and Zaps

  Chess Target Practice

  Chess Thinking

  Kasparov and Deep Blue

  More Chess Openings: Traps and Zaps 2

  More Chessercizes: Checkmate!

  Pandolfini’s Chess Complete

  Pandolfini’s Endgame Course

  Power Mates

  Square One

  Weapons of Chess

  The Winning Way

  FIRESIDE

  Rockefeller Center

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  Copyright © 2003 by Bruce Pandolfini

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pandolfini, Bruce.

  Pandolfini’s ultimate guide to chess / by Bruce Pandolfini.

  p. cm.

  “A Fireside book.”

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Chess. I. Title: Ultimate guide to chess. II. Title.

  GV1445.P25793 2003

  794.1—dc21 2003054221

  eISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6098-5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-2617-2

  www.Simonspeakers.com

  ISBN 0-7432-2617-8

  For my daughter Sarah, for every moment I live and beyond

  PROLOGUE: Chess, The Universal Game

  LESSON 1: In the Beginning

  The Moves and Rules

  LESSON 2: Arming for Attack

  Non-mating Tactics

  LESSON 3: Defining the Goal

  Mating Patterns

  LESSON 4: Terms of Engagement

  The Elements

  LESSON 5: Staking out Territory

  Opening Principles and the First Move

  LESSON 6: Establishing the Neutral Zone

  Black’s Response

  LESSON 7: Determining Priorities

  Development and the Center

  LESSON 8: Starting the Campaign

  Comparing Minor Pieces

  LESSON 9: Digging the Trenches

  Trades, Pins, and More on Minor Pieces

  LESSON 10: Accumulating Advantages

  Pawn Play and Weaknesses

  LESSON 11: Forming Plans

  Doubled Pawns, Castling, and Open Lines

  LESSON 12: Evaluating and Calculating

  The Middlegame, Exchange Values, How to Analyze

  LESSON 13: Breaking Through

  Strategy and Tactics, the Importance of Material, Avoiding Errors

  LESSON 14: The Beginning of the End

  Endgame Principles, Centralization, the Active King, and Pawn Promotion

  LESSON 15: Approaching the Goal

  The Passed Pawn and Pawn Majorities

  LESSON 16: All Good Things Come to an End

  The Seventh Rank, Invasion, and Simplification

  EPILOGUE: Chess = me2

  APPENDIX 1: Glossary

  APPENDIX 2: Opening Moves

  APPENDIX 3: Chess on the Web

  APPENDIX 4: World Champions

  APPENDIX 5: Significant Dates in Chess History

  APPENDIX 6: Quotes

  APPENDIX 7: Chess in Movies and Books

  APPENDIX 8: The Most Famous Chess Game of All Time

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Somewhere back in time, human beings invented chess. Ever since, men and women have tried to explain their fascination for, attraction to, even obsession with a checkered board and its symbolic figures. A struggle of will, a contest of intellects, the vicissitudes and intrigue of power relationships, childhood delight, and just plain fun—chess can stand for it all.

  Chess reflects the real world in miniature. Endeavor, struggle, success, and defeat—they are part of each game ever played. Thomas Huxley, the scientist who helped Darwin write the theory of evolution into nineteenth-century philosophy, said: “The rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The chessboard is the world” and “The pieces are the phenomena of the universe.”

  Ben Franklin, possibly the best American chessplayer of his time, also believed that the chessboard constituted a microcosm of the real world. Studying chess had practical value, he argued. Understanding the moves, rules, and structure of the game encouraged the development and training of essential intellectual skills such as inductive and deductive reasoning, long-term planning, and creative problem-solving. Plenty of present-day educators who have studied the effects of chessplaying on other disciplines have added their approval to Franklin’s words. Once again Old Ben was on to something ahead of the pack.

  Chess is more than a game. It’s a universal tale of interlocking relationships, layered thinking, analytical drive, and an intuitive sense of how things work. It’s mathematical yet musical, logical but theoretical. It can be art or sport, contest or dream, fantasy or reality. Whatever the game’s ultimate significance, perhaps you’ve picked up this book hoping to go beyond the moves and rules to exploring some of the game’s aura and seductive mystery.

  What better way to learn the universal game than through a universal learning process? Almost as soon as a child begins to talk, it starts asking questions, many unanswerable. In this book, a teacher uses Socratic methods to reveal the fundamentals of chess interactively, in give-and-take conversations with a rather challenging student. We learn through their question-and-answer sessions. Their debates over chessic possibilities make up the chapters. And each chapter constitutes an actual chess lesson—on the game’s moves and rules; on opening, middlegame, and endgame structure; on principles, tactics, and strategy; and on anything else germane to the improvement of chess skill that might come up.

  Since we learn best by doing, the teacher in this book illustrates chess essentials by using an instructionally created but perfectly natural game. White and Black, teacher and student, discuss their choices and reasoning just as players would if they were going over a real game—by considering options, variations, and possibilities throughout.

  What makes their game different is that it doesn’t emphasize the state-of-the-art moves grandmasters play and seldom bother to explain. Rather, it includes a normal mixture of good, reasonable, and even bad moves that inexperienced players are likely to consider. Furthermore, the moves and their respective variations, though shown in clear diagrams that everyone can understand, are also expressed conversationally, in asides and as thoughts seem pertinent. That’s just the way players converse about chess in any country of the world. To avoid confusion from the real game’s moves and their analytic alternates, boldface is used for actual moves, and ordinary type for moves that are possible but not played.

  Most introductory chess books offer lofty principles, presenting them as if they’re inviolable absolutes in a grand narrative. But those learning the game naturally have many questions about the other side of things, when particular principles don’t apply and the story takes unexpected twists and turns.

  Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess offers an abun
dance of principles, but it also devotes time to their exceptions and subtle colors—the very things that make the game and those who play it distinctive. Furthermore, because we’re dealing directly with principles and their exceptions, our teacher and student may take a second or even a third look at an idea throughout the course of the game. No lesson is wholly and completely digested in one try anyway, and the flow of the book’s discourse reproduces this reality. Repetition is a crucial part of typical learning, and this text aims to capture the natural feel of the learning process. To this end, the dialogue includes the constant use of instructional reinforcement, as well as the sort of typical banter and lighter moments integral to the interactive exchange of question-and-answer learning.

  This book partially draws on ideas in my earlier publications. But over time, experience teaches us how to compose more precise formulations and more effective presentations. Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess uses an innovative framework to show you exactly what you need to know in order to understand how chess is played, and how it ought to be played. Reading it should help equip you with the tools required to play and enjoy a challenging game of chess, even if you’re starting from a position of knowing relatively nothing about pawns or society’s metaphors for them. As you absorb specific chessic knowledge, you’ll acquaint yourself with valuable analytic weapons that can be used to sharpen your approach, not only for playing chess, but for any intellectual endeavor whatsoever.

  While you’re luxuriating in the joy of pure mental stimulation, perhaps even learning how to beat someone you’ve never quite been able to beat before, you might also pick up on something else: how not to beat yourself. How many games can offer all this and be as rewarding as all that?

  LESSON 1

  THE MOVES AND RULES

  Teacher: Let’s not set up the board just yet.

  Student: Why not?

  Teacher: Because we should start at the beginning.

  Student: And where’s that?

  Teacher: It’s hard to say. Maybe wherever myth, stories, and history happen to intersect. Before Alice in Wonderland but after The Book of the Dead. Inside Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame or on the screen with Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

  Student: Chess is our culture?

  Teacher: East or West. Take the moral of this particular chessic fairy tale as an example. According to the story, the game was created by the philosopher Sissa, a Brahmin. The sage’s aim was to teach a rich and despotic king a valuable real-life lesson. In the game, the king learns he can’t win without marshaling all his forces. From the game he learns that he can’t rule without the support of his subjects.

  Student: Is that the only explanation?

  Teacher: Not by a long shot. Chess has its own mythology—about the game’s origins, its proponents and players, and even its very purpose. But no one really knows who invented chess. Some historians claim the Greeks invented the game; others say the Egyptians should be given the credit. The Chinese, the Persians, the Jews, the Irish, and the Welsh have their champions, too. There are even chess quotes attributed to Heraclitus and Aristotle, but they are clearly the result of some pretty imaginative rewriting of history.

  Student: Why?

  Teacher: Both men were dead centuries before the game had ever been conceived.

  Student: Okay. So when do we think the big chess bang occurred?

  Teacher: Most authorities believe chess is a descendant of chataranga, a game played in western India, probably sometime between the fifth and sixth century A.D. We’re fairly sure the chataranga pieces paralleled segments of the Indian army of the time. From the get-go, the figures apparently represented real-world counterparts and imitated them in the way they moved. For example, the ratha, or chariot, which, in some cases, was a roka, or boat, moved up and down or across and was positioned in the corner at the game’s start. It became the rook in chess. The asva, or horse, became the knight, with movement exactly like today’s knight, remaining unchanged for the past fourteen centuries. And the padati, or infantryman, moved one square forward. In chess it became the pawn.

  Student: So chess is an Eastern thing?

  Teacher: Well, at least an Indus Valley thing. Traveling mainly with itinerant merchants, it didn’t really reach Europe until the late Middle Ages, and from there was brought to America a few centuries later. But no one in the New World knew much about it before Benjamin Franklin penned America’s first chess book. Here, take a look at it.

  Student (reading): “The game of chess is not merely idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it.” Cool. Did Franklin really write this?

  Teacher: He certainly did. In any case, we probably won’t ever know how and when chess was created for sure. Some aspects of chess probably evolved from earlier games, including the board itself. Playing surfaces with differently colored squares can be traced back to some of the most ancient board games ever found, even to the discoveries at Ur from around 4000 B.C. But some of chess’s key concepts may have been generated spontaneously at a much later time. Not necessarily by men, either.

  Student: Actually, I’ve seen medieval paintings of women playing chess.

  Teacher: Some observers have claimed that the game’s creators could have been women, sitting at home or in the court, taking part in a form of mock war by emulating the fighting going on for real somewhere else. But to date, I’m afraid all this entertaining conjecture about the game’s origin has yet to prove anything conclusive.

  Student: Is there anything I can accept for sure about chess?

  Teacher: Absolutely. For example, the moves and the rules. Now let’s take out the board and have a look. Chess is played by two people on a board of sixty-four squares, of which thirty-two are light and thirty-two are dark. There are eight rows of eight squares each. The squares appear in three kinds of rows: (1) files, the vertical rows (diagram 1); (2) ranks, the horizontal rows (diagram 2); and (3) diagonals, the slanted rows of one color (diagram 3).

  Diagram 1. Files.

  Diagram 2. Ranks.

  Diagram 3. Diagonals.

  Teacher: Files are lettered a through h, beginning from White’s left. Ranks are numbered 1 through 8, beginning from White’s nearest rank. The players sit on opposite sides of the board, next to their forces. Pieces occupy first ranks (diagram 4).

  Diagram 4. The battleground: Pieces start on the ranks marked by bullets.

  Student: Those are the ranks closest to each player?

  Teacher: Right. The pawns occupy second ranks, the next rank in for each player. There should be a light square in the near corner at each player’s right (diagram 4). There are a couple of sayings: “light is right” or “light on the right.” They will help you place the board in its proper position. Want to guess how the pieces are placed?

  Student: I know the same kinds of White and Black pieces begin on the same files. Black rooks line up against White rooks, Black knights start in line with White knights, and so on (diagram 5).

  Diagram 5. The same kinds of pieces face each other at the start.

  Teacher: Right again. The queens start on squares of their own color, next to their respective kings. The White queen begins on the central light square, the Black queen on the central dark square (diagram 6). Remember another saying, “queen on its own color,” to avoid misplacing each side’s king and queen when setting up. If the board is placed correctly, with a light square on the right, the queens can be placed correctly and centrally, on their own color.

  Teacher: Now let’s set up the whole board. Make sure that light squares are on each player’s right hand, the queens are on their own colors, and all White and Black pieces line up directly across from each other (diagram 7).

  Diagram 6. Queens start on their own colors: White on light Black on dark.

  Diagram 7. The starting position.

  Student: I’ve heard players referring to the queenside and kingside when th
ey talk about chess. What do they mean?

  Teacher: In chess parlance, we sometimes want to be able to refer to pieces and pawns according to their position at the start of a game. Therefore, the rooks, bishops, and knights are often named according to which side of the board they are on in the initial setup. Moving across the board from left to right, you’ll find the queen-rook, the queen-knight, the queen-bishop, the queen, the king, the king-bishop, the king-knight, and the king-rook (diagram 8).

  Diagram 8. The descriptive names of the pieces.

  Student: What about the names of the pieces? Do they change based on where they go?

  Teacher: The name of the piece never varies, no matter where it’s moved in the course of a game. The king-rook is always the king-rook, even if it winds up on the queenside of the board.

  Diagram 9. Pawns are named according to the file they are on.

  Student: When I watched a game, players took turns moving one piece per turn, in one direction per turn.

  Teacher: And White always moved first. All moves must conform to the rules. If a move violates a rule, it’s illegal and must be replayed with a legal move, using whatever unit was touched.

  Student: Why don’t you say, “whatever piece was just touched?” Using the term unit makes it sound so military.

  Teacher: Chess is a war game. But don’t be confused by that. By war game, I don’t mean a game revolving around medieval pageantry, with knights dressed in shining armor, going through tournament maneuvers and the like. Nor am I talking about staged battles, where players reenact famous confrontations. Rather, I’m referring to the way certain games are won—by capturing or destroying something in particular. In this sense, chess is a war game, which is won by “capturing” the other side’s king. Also, chess parlance differentiates between pieces, which include everything but the pawns, and pawns, which are therefore not pieces. That’s why we’ll use the word “unit” when we’re talking generally about chess figures. Do you know, by the way, why a player would have to move a unit he had touched?