Hi there.
In this introduction, actually, I just want to go over the course index and conventions generally.
So I talk about ingredients because I like those Master Chef people on TV telling you about these herbs
they're adding, which you may never have heard of.
These ingredients, these kind of secret ingredients that often differentiate, like the master chefs
from lesser masters of cooking.
So in chess, yeah, they're all attacking ingredients to be aware of.
And it's good to refine how we evaluate positions and maybe leverage some of these ingredients like
Bishop without a counterpart.
When you've got a certain bishop without a counterpart.
It can be dangerous or form pawn.
So there's a lot of concepts in this course which you may get a chance to use in your own games.
So we're also improving our evaluation of positions, not just our calculation, but by having these
kind of tags, ingredients, you call them patterns, call them what you want, but they're items of
interest, which can affect one's evaluation of positions.
And so makes things more powerful.
When we calculate, we can look at the resulting positions, especially at the end of our calculations,
and say, Oh, well, we've got better our accounts by Oh, well, there's a form pawn, Oh well we've
got this, which is an attacking ingredients.
These signposts for attacking ingredients improve our evaluation of positions and evaluation is very,
very important because we can't calculate that many moves ahead.
We need to rely heavily, quite often on intuitive evaluation.
So we're trying to get these ingredients, you know, how did our clinical staff get these fantastic
positions?
What were the ingredients which want to show examples for each potential ingredients?
And the early sections of the course cover general aspects of king safety, like the Castled King or
the weakened King or opposite side castling.
So those kind of conditions for where the king is are very, very important.
But then we go on to more sophisticated ingredients, which you may never have heard of before.
When I use seeds, that's a shortcut.
I want to give you maximum space for showing the theme of the game.
Seeds means the number of collections a game is in at Chess Gamescom, which is one of my favorite sites
for checking out all the games.
And often I find the more collections the game is then, the more iconic it is, the more celebrated
it is.
And often it's kind of really instructive and compelling and dramatic.
People love drama.
I love drama.
I'm sure you love drama, but it's good if drama is also instructive.
It's good if drama is nutritious.
That's a great aspect of attacking chess.
It can be dramatic, but also instructive, especially if we take time to find and ask the questions.
Or how did this attacking position exactly happen?
So basically, yeah, I want you to kind of take in these patterns, these tags, these collections.
The key is so the insights labels, they that are available in this course, hopefully they'll start
flowing more easily in your games and more useful to establish the attacking ingredients.
And the game usually has multiple attacking tags within it.
It might not just be one advantage, it might be several advantages like stronger center of protection
of E5 Bishop.
It might be several ingredients all working together.
And you know, when I was studying a lot of neural network games, especially, you know, alphazero
kind of a game changer, it did show us well for me especially showed us a lot of key elements which
people were not really talking about in the past literature like Form Pawns or Bishop Mountain counterparts.
I've tried to introduce these and emphasize these over protection was from Nimzowitsch, though some
are from Nimzowitsch in famous Nimzowitsch.
My system is a classic book, but there's some fun.
Like themes like a Queen in Siberia is like saying if the opponent's queen is away from their kings,
it's a way of saying that.
So we want to basically improve our attacking evaluation of positions, our sense of the attacking potential
of situations.
That's really important in chess, because checkmate ends the game.
It's not all about material.
It's not a game just for the accounts and chess about accumulating material.
You know, we can we can checkmate from being several pieces down.
That's the key.
Beautiful thing I find about chess.
The reason why attacking patterns from neural networks are very, very interesting is they're also kind
of verified they were beating some of the much more analytical engine.
The classic AB engines, alpha beta engines, which were analyzing often a lot more positions.
We want to have that ideal where we don't really have to calculate that much and wear ourselves out,
and we've got a greater instinct for attacking gradients.
That's really great.
It means we can calculate less sometimes.
We also can say, Well, it's just all about evaluation of the core, the core elements, the four core
elements that many test websites allude to.
King Safety versus material, pawn structure versus piece activity four So we can often sacrifice material
if we can reduce the opponents king safety or we can often sacrifice the structure of our pawns or even
sacrifice pawns generally in order to maximize our piece activity, because pawns are the fundamental
constraint of the pieces, especially if you read Michael Stephen's, you know, simple chess.
That's one of the things he said.
So the evaluation aspect, sure, you've got the main core elements of positions, but these other elements
alluded to here are more specific and worth thinking about in my view.
And I personally make use of these attacking themes in my games continually, like every day online.
And I just love attacking Chancellor, I love winning with these attacking ingredients.
So it's like sharing the attacking ingredients and also trying to build up my own attacking game as
well.
So this course is a work in progress.
If there's any other important attacking things that crop up, sure, I'll create a new section I'll
put examples in to reinforce, because this is all about our evaluation, our instincts being built
up in this course for these themes, these tags, these patterns which create the ingredients, the
exciting ingredients we're looking for to get those winning attacking combinations, especially over
the opponent's king, not just to win material.
So okay, so the course.
Yeah.
Is basically celebrating the ingredients of attacking chess.
And I hope a lot of those ingredients you'll be starting to use in your own games.
Okay.
Here is an example game from the world of neural networks.
Komodo was playing with 64 bit Comodo four cores.
This is on a fast time limit, but four engines, you know, they can they can crunch so many positions.
This was 5 minutes per game with 10 seconds per move increments.
So not not such a quick time control but from this position.
Yeah, Lela with the black pieces played a brilliant foresighted sacrifice here.
So can you guess what that is?
So the leading neural network calculating far less than its alpha beta engine classic engine counterparts
played nine times G two.
So this has all sorts of attacking implications.
Let's just see the game.
KING Tanks, G2, Bishop Africa.
King G1 and having this huge confidence that this attack is is working is justified.
So rook D1 rook f6, you can see the resources are flowing to the opponent's king.
That weaken king position does imply that actually there's a lot of responsibilities and roles that
can be taken up with these attacking pieces.
So we have H for Rook H six King if on the king tries to flee.
But now actually there's an element here left over.
There's a there's an outside pass pawn.
So even though the king is not being mated, that's not always an outcome sometimes which is needed.
We don't even need to make the opponent's king.
The team is on full blast.
Every piece is working hard here.
Now the h pawn is coming along and the IVB engine is struggling here as leader is improving and improving
the position.
So making way for the pawn here and conceding F2 now, which goes into this nasty pen.
And so the pressure's building up the pass pawns Optimus now C5 Queen G friend the game actually ended
here so what an amazing you know winning attack basically which created that winning outside pawn if
King C as an example, then black is queen ing and then bishop takes E2 and the attack rages on here.
So this would be absolutely a winning position, as example, where black is going to be material up
with still a vicious attack.
So yeah, this is just an example to show, you know, it'll be hopeless here given this is the case
and this is time for desperation.
So, yes, these intuitive sacrifices were shown in neural networks, and neural networks are essentially
quite often it's about pattern recognition, pattern matching.
And for me, yeah, there were great source of attacking themes and general themes in chess.
So they for me are a kind of game changer because if you consider the number of calculations was far
less than the traditional engines.
So it's less about playing the position like a supercomputer, but more about intuition, intuitive
factors that we can kind of identify.
And I've made use of form pawns, for example, in so many games since studying neural network games.
I just found them incredibly instructive.
So sometimes if you're following an example of a model player or a computer, if the computer is not
really computing that much, it could actually be instructive, like in the case of neural networks.
Now, in this course, we're lucky to have great technology.
This course in the latest Stockfish does incorporate neural network aspects so we can learn all aspects
of the game even from the opening.
And that's important because often the ingredients for attacks are born out of the opening advantages.
So it's important to make notes and be very nuanced in our analysis of most games to see how advantage
is accumulated, what advantage is accumulated, etc..
So yeah, we can learn a lot from the neural networks and this is just one game example, just to show
you that sometimes even if we don't checkmate an outside pass, Paul might be winning.
So okay, so Layla and Alphazero also potential attacking heroes to learn a lot from in the engine world,
as well as all the amazing attacking players of our rich and cherished chess history and culture.
Okay.
And so much.