Missing principled idea

I had two slow time control games against my good man drfrankenstein on FICS. Here I am steering the rather sterile technical endgame to finish and missing two principled ideas.

If I move a piece, how will my opponent responds? In chess is this idea of response that somehow drops from my limited understanding.

If I want to be more specific: I always give squares and get squares while moving a piece. Which squares will I give?

Black to move and loose

s

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Ten points and a parrot sticker for the one who finds my move.

Pawn mate

Using Peshk for practising basic pawn mates in one has changed somehow my feeling for the position when opponents king is loose. The importance and functionality of pawns in creating mating net has occured to me.

White to move

So white to move and mate here.

White to move

This is from bullet game where I had played g4 and opponent erred with c3.

The move that brought me to my record high

 

Once again one  my opponents played the dubious Bf5?! after 1.d4  d5 2.c4 Nf6 3.Nc3. And once again 4.Qb3! refutes this as far as I understand.

Couple of moves later we reach this position on the picture and his bishop is threatening my queen. I was happy to find the winner. In fact I seem to remember this from some previous game where the same tactic endured. So this time around everything was at its right place.

White to move

What is the winner?

When your friend pushes you into right direction

I’ve been nagged by my lousy tactics by a friend in FICS so I spent some days at chess.ermrald.net trying to improve. Here’s a position from recent blitz game against 1458 player where he had major tactical oversight with ..Qb6. I am sure the hours spent on tactics helped here to see the oversight. Actually I saw the possibility even before black move and kept summoning (shouting aloud) the possibility to play it.

White to move.

That’s the way – aha aha

White to move

Here’s pretty neat and unorthodox mate in three for you to solve.

Everything was right in the position but…

Black to move

Here I have penetrated white position with doom hanging over whites king. This was from chess.com 60 30 game. I saw the right idea but executed the combination the wrong way. Do you see the right order to execute the threat of mate and capturing the queen? (Stop here if you want to work it out.)

I played Qa1+  when after Kd2 Bb4+?? is serious mistake as Rxa1 Bxc3+ Kxc3 I essentially sacrifice a bishop for nothing. So instead of BB4+ I just have to retreat the queen.

Yet more excellent coverage

Before we get back to the key moments in my recent slow time control games I wanted to let you know in the case you missed excellent coverage of Biel tournament on excellent Chessbases youtube channel.  Here example of Alexei Shirov and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave going at their game with lot of insights.