WEBVTT 00:01.260 --> 00:02.130 Hi there. 00:02.340 --> 00:05.640 In this lecture, I want to talk about attacking chess and beauty. 00:05.670 --> 00:09.570 Now, this might not be everyone's preference. 00:09.720 --> 00:14.850 You might just want attacking chess and accuracy and beauty is just a side effect. 00:15.480 --> 00:22.080 But, you know, we live in a world of social media, and you might want to share really beautiful games. 00:22.080 --> 00:24.910 You might want to have the brilliancy game of some tournaments. 00:24.930 --> 00:28.110 There might be tournaments with the brilliancy prize in general. 00:28.650 --> 00:36.810 And if you look at games databases in for example, chess games, com it's one of my favorite sites. 00:36.810 --> 00:41.700 You can see people adding the beautiful games in general to their collections more and more like the 00:41.700 --> 00:45.270 Paul Morphy opera game is an extremely beautiful game. 00:45.600 --> 00:50.760 And do we actually want to make beauty a priority and how do we actually make it a priority? 00:51.030 --> 00:57.150 We do have to be strong tactics and combinations to have beautiful finishes so you can have an attacking 00:57.150 --> 01:02.040 style, but you might not be finishing in a beautiful way. 01:03.090 --> 01:10.620 And so, yes, I do have a course on The Art of Checkmate because it is like an art of mating and beautiful 01:10.620 --> 01:14.840 mating patterns and combinations, and also the complete guide to chess Tactics. 01:14.850 --> 01:20.520 So these Help Crown are attacking style with beautiful conclusions. 01:21.360 --> 01:26.040 So you might not be totally mercenary sometimes, or you might permit yourself to try and play a more 01:26.040 --> 01:29.430 beautiful game as particularly pleasing in the end. 01:30.840 --> 01:40.380 So there is a kind of beauty tradeoff attacking style versus beauty tradeoff. 01:40.650 --> 01:43.360 But we do need our combinations to be sound. 01:43.380 --> 01:48.120 Ideally, we don't really want to trade off our results and our accuracy by playing something extremely 01:48.120 --> 01:53.970 dodgy with the hope of getting a beautiful combination when the opponent could have just avoided that. 01:54.270 --> 01:58.420 Taking risks for results is not really my cup of tea. 01:58.440 --> 02:04.530 Usually when I try and calculate some amazing queen sacrifice or whatever I do kind of double check, 02:04.530 --> 02:05.490 triple check. 02:05.820 --> 02:12.390 Because you know, when you embark on sacrificial play to try and create a masterpiece, you are incurring 02:12.390 --> 02:13.160 risk. 02:13.170 --> 02:19.890 So hopefully most of the time you understand that and you're not going to be playing uncertainly just 02:19.890 --> 02:22.920 to create a brilliant finish, which has some flaw in it. 02:23.520 --> 02:27.660 But, you know, Kasparov versus Topalov, you'll see these in this course. 02:27.660 --> 02:30.410 There's a lot of beautiful game examples in this course. 02:30.420 --> 02:36.750 And the beauty angle, Yeah, I do find it interesting to be able to tell you the number of game collections. 02:36.750 --> 02:43.920 So you've seen each section sees like 150, sees 200, sees the number of game collections, people 02:43.920 --> 02:48.300 collected games, then shows sometimes an element of beauty in those games. 02:48.480 --> 02:51.270 And for me, you know, we want to learn in style. 02:51.270 --> 02:52.530 I like to learn in style. 02:52.530 --> 02:54.450 Everyone likes to learn in style. 02:54.480 --> 02:59.850 Things nowadays, like interactive ways of learning, mathematics, whatever we want to learn in style, 02:59.850 --> 03:03.660 we want to have beautiful games to learn from. 03:05.280 --> 03:07.950 And we see, you know, very nice combinations. 03:07.950 --> 03:13.110 We play quite often to crown the efforts and the whole attacking style. 03:13.110 --> 03:15.900 You know, definitely a bias for King attacking. 03:16.080 --> 03:19.950 You know, that's what we kind of, you know, live for in a way. 03:19.950 --> 03:24.090 It's not just the results on on the tomb and say, well, unless you're like a chess professional, 03:24.090 --> 03:28.860 it's all about the results and income, but maybe, you know, you're not in that situation. 03:28.860 --> 03:34.080 And so you can permit yourself to see, you know, the art of chess, not just the, you know, the 03:34.080 --> 03:35.340 results of chess. 03:35.490 --> 03:41.220 And, you know, many attacking players have said in the past that or of attacking players that even 03:41.220 --> 03:46.020 if they didn't win the tournament, their games will be held up for celebration, you know, hundreds 03:46.020 --> 03:47.730 of years later potentially. 03:47.730 --> 03:52.380 And that's why you've got things like the Immortal Game, you know, or Evergreen game. 03:52.380 --> 03:54.870 They're going to be looked at in later generations. 03:54.870 --> 04:00.510 So when you create beauty on the chessboard, you are kind of creating sometimes a work of art. 04:00.690 --> 04:04.980 And I remember I had this Queen sacrifice game when I was playing for Muswell Hill Chess Club, and 04:04.980 --> 04:07.280 I actually had a sleepless night over it. 04:07.350 --> 04:13.080 Usually I have sleepless nights when I lose, and I need to get into analyzing the game to make sure 04:13.080 --> 04:18.540 I can get my sleep back, just to try and learn the lessons, to try and change it from a sporting event 04:18.540 --> 04:22.740 to a more scientific event to say, Well, okay, at least I learnt this and this and this. 04:22.890 --> 04:28.440 But I had this effect of doing this Queen sacrifice, which is a bit of a downside that you might not 04:28.440 --> 04:30.630 be able to sleep after through over excitement. 04:30.750 --> 04:35.400 But if you're into social media, you might start a channel, some YouTube channel one day. 04:35.400 --> 04:40.620 You know, to have beautiful games is something great to share with other people as if you're sharing, 04:40.620 --> 04:41.790 you know, works of art. 04:42.780 --> 04:45.930 So you could, you know, live for beautiful moves. 04:45.930 --> 04:50.040 And also, you know, I like shackling sometimes I'm beating a very strong opponent with a beautiful 04:50.040 --> 04:50.250 moon. 04:50.250 --> 04:54.420 I see the chat light up on online in the comments. 04:54.630 --> 04:59.700 So, yes, creating beautiful games is really it can be a you know, a great. 05:00.250 --> 05:03.910 And it can be rewarded, especially with things like Brinsley Prizes. 05:03.920 --> 05:10.130 In the past, you know, players were getting brilliancy prizes or, you know, when they had amazing 05:10.130 --> 05:11.630 efforts, creative efforts. 05:12.740 --> 05:17.630 But the romantic era of chess is where we had these unsound gambits. 05:17.630 --> 05:24.740 And even though it was, you know, very beautiful in the end, sometimes it was kind of unsound how 05:24.740 --> 05:27.470 to get there to the beautiful combinations in the end. 05:28.010 --> 05:28.910 So 05:30.980 --> 05:39.110 basically, yeah, we really want a king attack style that. 05:40.490 --> 05:44.060 Is there and also with hi beauty at the end. 05:44.210 --> 05:46.700 But yeah, this those are two variables. 05:46.700 --> 05:50.510 But if you factor in accuracy, you do also want accuracy. 05:50.510 --> 05:53.090 Then it's kind of assumed by this. 05:53.090 --> 05:56.060 For me, it's assumed I still want accuracy. 05:56.330 --> 06:00.980 So yeah, if I can finish games off beautifully without compromising accuracy, if I can play games 06:00.980 --> 06:06.440 from the outset without compromising my openings too much playing dodgy stuff, then it's kind of less 06:06.440 --> 06:08.450 regret when you hit stronger and stronger opponents, then. 06:08.450 --> 06:11.510 I'm not just embarrassing you because you had a poor position from the opening. 06:11.510 --> 06:11.840 Yeah. 06:11.840 --> 06:18.320 You want to have this slight bias picking style attack and maybe, you know, a slight preference for 06:18.320 --> 06:21.080 beauty in the end for beautiful combinations at the end. 06:21.090 --> 06:26.810 So because that'll help if you want to like share these works with other people. 06:27.050 --> 06:37.340 So basically, yeah, there's a slight conflict between appreciating beauty sometimes in the Immortal 06:38.150 --> 06:44.690 Games which might be kind of dodgy openings or whatever, or the romantic era in general. 06:44.690 --> 06:49.880 There's a lot in the romantic era which Alexander Alekhine actually came after. 06:49.880 --> 06:56.060 So the romantic era, it kind of was beautiful, but not so accurate. 06:56.060 --> 07:03.440 But that's kind of assumed in this course that we we do actually want accuracy in general. 07:03.440 --> 07:09.650 And our points out, even in wins of an attacking player where the opponent could have had resources 07:09.650 --> 07:13.340 to the fence or sometimes be better, we need objectivity. 07:13.340 --> 07:20.990 If we go back to Alexander Alekhine's quotation about objectivity, chess teaches you basically objectivity. 07:21.320 --> 07:23.990 So yes, beauty is a nice to have. 07:24.290 --> 07:29.630 There is an argument, you know, for this noise to have, and especially if you're prepared to put 07:29.630 --> 07:35.210 in the work in to be brilliant at combinations and tactics so you can have those final brilliant crowning 07:35.210 --> 07:36.380 combinations. 07:36.770 --> 07:37.460 Okay. 07:37.460 --> 07:43.790 So you too could potentially create more and more attacking masterpieces, which are also, you know, 07:43.790 --> 07:45.890 they're very, very beautiful by nature. 07:46.430 --> 07:47.070 Okay. 07:47.120 --> 07:49.850 I hope you got some thoughts out of this. 07:50.150 --> 07:54.980 Got some food for thought from this angle and so much.