What distinguishes the expert from the amateur in chess is partly tactical fluency, but also the ability to map out long-term patterns, in other words to visualise a distant goal. Some champions were distinguished by their talent for rough-and-tumble tactics; among such illuminati one could mention Alekhine, Tal and Kasparov. Others, such as Capablanca, Reti, Nimzowitsch, Smyslov and Karpov, stood out by virtue of their ability to foresee routes to victory that could only have been vaguely discernible to the average chess eye.
A new book Planning: Move by Move by Zenon Franco (Everyman Chess) explains this long-range vision and how to improve one’s prospects of achieving it. A particular expert in planning was Tigran Petrosian, whose 90th anniversary we are celebrating this year. In this week’s game his apparent feint on the queenside is only the prelude to a mighty onslaught which his opponent had anticipated would develop on the opposite wing.
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