Gaito: This game is a good example of how a grandmaster should play against an unrated or unknown opponent. The grandmaster ought not to try to force matters or waste energy attempting to refute the first strange move or the first mistake that he perceives. On the contrary, he should just play normal moves, simple chess (not forceful variations), and more mistakes will probably appear sooner or later. One mistake will likely be followed by another, and another..., and thus a good deal of energy will be saved.The late British international master Simon Webb wrote a very interesting book whose title is "Chess for Tigers". In chapter 5 ("How to catch Rabbits") Webb wrote the following advice:
"Against an opponent who is considerably weaker than you, it is not so important to search for specific weaknesses in his style —just regard his whole play as one big weakness"...
"The most effective approach is to wait for your opponent to make a few more mistakes, rather than trying to refute the first one".
"The worst thing you can do is overpress. The average strong player, when up against a weaker player whom he feels he must beat, sometimes tries too hard to punish his first mistake. He sees a slight inaccuracy, spends valuable time trying to work out a refutation of it, and then goes into a complicated forced line. The result is that the weaker player just plays forced moves, while the stronger player has all the pressure on himself, since he is trying to win the position, instead of concentrating on beating his opponent".
n 1929 Capablanca was invited to play in a tournament in Barcelona where, aside from Tartakower, Colle and Yates, the remaining 13 participants were players who were considerably weaker than the aforementioned grandmasters. Capablanca finished in first place with 13½ out of 14 possible points (his only draw was against Tartakower). It is very interesting to notice the way Capa played against those players whom he thought were much weaker than himself: he just started playing simple moves and slowly deprived them from possible counterplay, while waiting for the mistakes to appear. Capa saved a lot of energy by playing like that. A good example is Capa's game as Black against the Spanish player José María Font, who might have had a rating of about 2350 or something like that, not higher. A good player, but not in the same class as Capablanca. The game is in this link:
J M Font vs Capablanca, 1929
Kibitzing
