(1) 14...gxh6 15.Bxf6 and Black must give up Queen for Bishop to avoid an immediate mate

(2) 14...Kh8 15.Nxf7+ Kg8 16.Nxd8

This site focusses on the end of a chess game. The killing blow or the miraculous draw. And most beginners tend to be overly interested in the opening phase. So much so that an entire industry has grown up where GM's write books about openings that they would never play OTB with macho titles like "Winning with the XXX" or "the Ultimate YYY".

But what about the bit in the middle? What happens after the opening and before the killing?

In other words, on a day where just about everyone will post the same combination, how did Alekhine get to that combination?

Now I used to think that this was GM magic. If a mating combination was three or four moves long, a middle-game operation leading to a mating combination must be ... ooh, somewhere between six and twelve moves long. Far too much for my little brain. I would find myself sitting at the board, with the opening successfully navigated and no immediate tactics in sight, thinking "now what do I do?"

Now I reckon that it is much easier than I had feared. It's not someone with a brain the size of a planet exercising monster calculating skills. Good players get through the middle game to the tactics by following one quite simple rule -

Put your bits on good squares.

That's it. Well, there's more but we don't need to talk about that right now.

In today's game, Alekhine whips up a killer tactic by move 14 because he puts his pieces on better squares than his opponent.

Just look at the knight on f5. From here he can strike at e7, g7 and h6. Alekhine puts him there when black commits his bishops to e7 and b7, so that the bishops can't challenge the knight. And black doesn't want to play g6 because it weakens the kingside. What is the knight going to do? I (and I suspect Alekhine) have no idea. Just sit him there and see what happens.

Black's Bb7 also allows white to park his queen on f3 without fearing a Bg4. from f3, her maj can do all sorts of mischief ... eventually. Add a white Bg5 and Re1 and we're starting to get all of our bits on hunky squares.

What is Alekhine going to do with these well-posted pieces? I'm willing to bet that he doesn't know yet. Put your bits on good squares and something will come up. You just need to be alert for it when it does.

14. Nh6+ and Black is busted.

14...Kh8 15. Nf7+ royal fork and 1:0

It just comes easier to some people..

Perhaps it is obvious, but I'm not so sure. For example, many people know that it is good to control an open file with a rook or two, but fewer people realise that one of the reasons you do this is to create entry squares for the rook.

And sure we can say that "it just comes easier to some people..."

The square f7 is defended by the king only. This suggests 14.Nh6+:

A) 14... Kh8 15.Nxf7+ Kg8 16.Nxd8 wins.

B) 14... gxh6 15.Bxf6

B.1) 15... Be7 16.Qg4+ Kf8 17.Qg7#.

B.2) 15... Qd7 16.Qg3+ Bg7 17.Qxg7#.

If I remember correctly, Spielmann said that he could spot combinations like Alekhine but he was not able to get those positions like the world champion.

14.Nh6+! and there is no good answer:

A) 14... Kh8 15.Nxf7+ wins the BQ, exploiting the weak f7.

B) 14... gxh6 15.Bxf6 Qc8/b8/d7 (or Re7) 16.Qg3+ Bg7 17.Qxg7#

B.1) 15... Be7 16.Qg3+ Kf8 17.Qg7#

B.2) 15... Qxf6 16.Qxf6

B.3) 15... other 16.Bxd8

If 14...♔h8 15 ♘xf7+ wins the queen

This one is pretty straightforward. White wins big material after

14 Nh6+ gxh6

On 14...Kh8 15 Nxf7+ Kg8 16 Nxd8 puts the game away.

15 Bxf6

Black is finished here. The queen is attacked, but should she move, say...

15...Qd7

then

16 Qg3+

net bb7 as trouble got in would qd7 marry hold in.

I peeked at eradiate rook over slumping light rays h6 it

support in Surge my Ricondo too delighted going down sac

knight take network bishop out.

Whats your bb7 in?

C6 doesn't it just loose atempo distribute it area me get why

tighter e7?

I used queen sortie in my it earlier days but could get kicked

around too explorative bishops one drab?

Before one move the position on <POTD> black removed his most important defender bishop from e7 to f8, weakening the defence his knight on f6. Even blindfolded can see that this knight now under attack by the bishop g5 and the queen f3 through knight f5, and if you take away pawn g6 ,this knight will be unprotected.

So, Nh6+ and game is over.

And this is the position for entertainment.White to play.

click for larger view

<Put your bits on good squares.> But this is par; hence even doing this peters out against an opponent as sound as you. Super-GMs do this against each other, get perfectly fine development, and then struggle for 30 moves over ideas we still don't grok.

Conversely, a miniature already implies some fundamental unsoundness from at least one side. Let's restrict to the case of the mismatch, e.g. a GM simul, or a 2600 vs 1900 wherein we say "rating difference, uh huh". How does the pro overwhelm the weekender?

Clearly, <good squares> is a start; let's call that <Phase I>. Beyond that, I add a tier of thinking: <supports many plans> (or "matches many patterns", which is probably highly correlated -- and that could be an eureka item itself.)

- I borrow your suggestion of working backward. A winner-by-force finishes the game in what we may call <Phase III: Lock-on Autopilot> mode, where he's already calculated it to a win, and he's just skiing down the ply-tree. Spielmann skis as well as Alyekin.

- Assume you have all necessary firepower, i.e. a winning plan exists, but you must find it. How do you know to look? Here, I think good players stratify through <intuition, pattern recognition, experience>, or sometimes outright home (prep) cooking. You must know all the mates; you must evaluate endgames correctly (to cover all side branches); it helps to have seen hundreds of similar positions, attacks, sacs, and wins. A noob never sees it (on either side), a tyro thinks "there's gotta be something like THAT sac", a master thinks "X-Y 1907, also G-H 1923, you missed a draw". (Nakamura says "done that, what's for dinner", he's already in Phase III.)

- By definition, then, Phase II is when you <don't> have a win-by-force all calculated out (but you've completed Phase I). This seems to me to be exactly the newbie's "what now?" fog, through which we've all gone (and not all passed :) A general corollary is: <improve your pieces>, i.e. move from their good squares to(ward) better ones. But <good> by what?

I surmise that a master relies again on his experience/intuition: that <many successful attacks> flowed from a positional characteristic (c.f. Nf5 in Ruy/Spanish!!). Over a corpus of thousands of games, you can rank piece-outposts (and thus repositionings, tours, mini-plans) based roughly on the average outcome of games in which they occurred. (From other sports, sabermetrics and Billy Beane's Moneyball did this in baseball, and ESPN/NFL just did it for the NFL QB rating system.)

Hence we park Bs on diagonals, get Rs to the 7th, plant Ne5/Ne6/Nf5, Qg3/Qg6 and rook lifts, and push our Ps to 6 or 3. Call these <fertile outposts>, from which tactics flow -- e.g. the knee-jerk Ne5 always threatens Nxf7!!, which has bamboozled even an Aronian. Hence, I think what a GM does in 3 seconds during a simul is to judge: what would be useful across the <largest swath of possible game-continuations>? That's a race, too: if your opponent just lets you amass these advantages without booting them out (e.g. Breyer g6 to deny Nf5), then at some critical mass you reach your Phase III transition -- which see.

<In today's game, Alekhine whips up a killer tactic by move 14 because he puts his pieces on better squares than his opponent.> The Nf5-Bg5-Q*3 complex is thematic in Spanish (which is an experience-lesson). The key idea of deflecting g open when Q-sees-g is the sting in the theme. Even the thrust <8.d4>, enjoying the mobile recapture <9.Nxd4>, is straight out of Sicilian theory. Black went wrong by allowing this, and then not contesting Nf5: his corpus is smaller than Alekhine's corpus, and his danger-sense was more rudimentary than Alekhine's lockon-sense.

Or 1...f5 2. ef (ep) and we are threatening mate on g7 and h7.