I own a few chess books that could serve as a murder weapon, but none so hefty as Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games. Nicknamed ‘The Brick’ by its fans, its thousand-odd pages forgo instructional text in favour of an escalating procession of puzzles, mostly mates in 1, 2 or 3 moves. These illustrate the most important patterns in chess, which form the vocabulary of any skilled player. This is a primer with a pedigree: the book was written by Laszlo Polgar, the father of the famous Polgar sisters, who believed that geniuses are made, not born. The manifest effort of compilation demands commensurate exertion from the reader.
Later in the book, sections are dedicated to positions where the critical blow lands on squares near a Black (or White) castled king: g7 (g2), h7 (h2), and so on. It is a useful but crude classification, and I fancy that I might one day attempt a better one, approaching the task with the earnest zeal of a Victorian lepidopterist. One weighty subdivision will comprise attacks with a distant bishop on the long diagonal, and another with a proximate knight on f5 (f4). Even the intersection of these themes offers a profusion of tactical concepts (see diagram 1).
The first diagram shows an attractive specimen from a recent online blitz game: Black to play and win. The winning move was played by Dominic Lawson — a former editor of this magazine and the current president of the English Chess Federation. White is under pressure, which he hopes to relieve by exchanging the queens. The move 20…Nf4!! destroys that hope, a vibrant fork against Qd3 and Bg2, enabled by the pin on the g-file and a striking diagonal crossfire.
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