A sense of danger

I have a pet theory, based not on hard data but on insights from postmortem chitchat. My theory says that novices and experts, when facing evenly matched opponents, make roughly the same number of screw-ups in a game. The difference is that the novice’s oversights will be far more significant. The novice walks into checkmate, where the grandmaster hangs a pawn. One blunders a bishop, where the other concedes a softening of the pawn structure.

Strong players rely on their well-honed sense of danger to avoid the most egregious errors. After studying hundreds of thousands of tactical motifs, one just knows when a situation looks sketchy – perhaps there are a couple of undefended pieces, and the king is open to attack. Sometimes you have to work with that, but then the mental gears work hard to make sure the house of cards won’t collapse. The worst case scenario is always covered.

The second guardian angel is a (measured) respect for the opponent. When a fellow grandmaster leaves a piece hanging, it’s a Trojan horse until proven otherwise.

And yet the odd howler still slips through. In the first diagram, from a game at last week’s CrunchLabs Masters, Alireza Firouzja has just played 7…Bf5-e4, His idea was to attack the Rh1 before recapturing on d5 with the bishop. That was a mistake, but an understandable one for a rapid game. It was his next move that was the real shocker, when a moment of tactical blindness coincided with extreme naivety.

Fabiano Caruana-Alireza Firouzja

Champions Chess Tour CrunchLabs Masters 2024

1 c4 c6 2 Nf3 d5 3 g3 Bg4 4 Ne5 Bf5 5 Qb3 Qb6 6 cxd5 Qxb3 7 axb3 Be4 (see diagram) Caruana pondered for 30 seconds before playing the strongest move, which also proffers a Trojan horse (or rather, a rook): 8 dxc6! Firouzja spent a couple of minutes in contemplation, before accepting it.