Small introduction of Garry Kasparov.

For many chess players, before Kasparov and after him, the game of chess consists of playing the opening moves, developing your pieces and then, when you reach the end of the development, at move 15 or 20, you start the game from there; you outplay your opponent.

But it’s not so with Kasparov. Kasparov was unique for the fact that he likes to fight for the initiative really straight from the opening moves. Many times, he would really amaze the world with some inventive ideas in the opening stage. He would often sacrifice material to make it difficult for his opponent to develop his pieces or to castle and so on.

The Exchange sacrifice was really one of the trademarks of Garry Kasparov. Many times, he made amazing positional sacrifices. Many of them were because of his home preparation.

In this lesson, I want to dedicate this section to one of the biggest rivalries in chess history, which is between our hero Garry Kasparov and the previous World Champion Anatoly Karpov. Specifically, I want to discuss the topic of the importance of playing openings and positions that suit your chess style.

Many players choose openings or positions to play just because they have seen some strong players playing this opening.

But there’s a big question: Is it really suitable for you as a chess player to your chess style? At the end, we are not engines, each one of us has a different style, a different way of playing.

In this video lesson, I’m going to discuss about the importance of being a universal chess player. What is a universal chess player? I mean it’s a player who is able to play at a good level in many types of positions. It might sound obvious that a good player needs to excel in all parts of the game, but that is not the case. I think the first world champion with a very much universal chess style was Boris Spassky back in the 60’s. Every world champion before him had a specialized style.

For example, Mikhail Tal was a very much sharp player, a very brilliant attacker; it was his style. Everybody knew that he always liked playing attacking games and sacrificing pieces almost in every opportunity. If you take a world champion like Mikhail Botvinnik, you see that he was a much more positional player; he had the so-called soviet chess school, which was based on these positional aspects of the game.

In this chapter, we are going to discuss Kasparov’s understanding of piece harmony or, if you like, piece coordination. So, one of the many things that Kasparov has in his games is the real ability to have this feeling for his pieces in such a way that he always knew how to improve his position, not thinking about one certain piece, but always thinking about his position as a whole.

In many chess videos or books, we are always said and taught that we should constantly try to improve our pieces, but I want to illustrate how Kasparov here in these games not only always tried to improve his pieces, but he did it in a very efficient way; in such a way that he not only improved one piece at a time but he always improved his position as a whole, thinking about all his pieces.

Here we are going to continue discussing Kasparov’s pawn sacrifices. This time, I’ll dedicate this lesson to pawn sacrifices that are more dynamic, which means that Kasparov sacrifices a pawn in order to get immediate advantages. Immediate advantages are different from long term advantages.

These types of advantages are disappearing over time, if you don’t use them correctly. We are usually talking about, for example, development advantage. So, development advantage in the opening is something which tends to evaporate over time: you must use it. Here Kasparov gives a very good illustration of how it can be done.

Kasparov was a very active player –always striving for activity to make the best out of his pieces. He didn’t care much about material. Kasparov goes for the ACTIVE DEFENSE (counterplay) rather than passive defense.