I see there's a few players on here but noticed there's no separate thread for it, so here we are. Haven't played for a year or two but keep meaning to make time for a slim routine of regular playing again. If anyone wants to play online sometime, and providing I can get on that website I'm up for a casual game or two.
Views on tactics, personal game strategies, openings, endgames, favourite moves, players, chess pieces and attacking piece combos?
I go for Queen's Gambit opening every time when white, with prawns in ranks 2, 3, 4, I find that quite an aggressive type of defence set up, I like to keep hold of my rooks and queen if poss, am always scared of horsies attacking so like to get them early or if I can't, then keep some prawns back to stop their advance.
Favourite player Kasparov, huge catalogue of moves and very attacking, fave attacking two piece combo to pin checkmate Queen, Rook, can't fail. If no queen or rooks left then a rook, bishop, horsie and single blocked prawn will do. Early/Mid game combo, if I can hold onto my bishops then I love to get them threatening the higher value pieces like rooks and those slippery horsies.
Going by Tony Slattery I would say 84. I can understand everything the Russian is saying with the algebraic notation and talking about ranks and files. It's amazing how deep chess is and how there is a name for everything. It's a good training video for a beginner because it shows the black king has been castled and is behind a pawn wall defence in the top right corner and the white's pawn defence in the bottom right is damaged exposing the white king on the G file. Black will have taken whites horsie on F3 when the only piece that can re-take is the pawn on G2. A common tactic after someone has castled. An equal trade in material but a big positional advantage to black.