Calculating Forcing Moves: Defensive Idea 5 (Counterattack) - Equal Threats

I am very glad to announce that I have figured out how to embed positions from chess.com into blogger!!  This will be my first post trying this out, so please let me know what you think and bear with me if it doesn't work quite right.

In my last post I gave an overview of the 5th defensive idea, counterattacking.  All counterattacks begin by creating an equal or greater threat (EGT), and there are three distinct goals when conducting a counterattack: to win, draw, or to defend.

In this post I'll  explore the idea of creating equal threats which is important to understanding greater threats, because not all equal threats are actually equal.  There are three elements to understanding an equal threat:  the value of the pieces, whether they are defended/undefended, and tempo (turn to move, capture-checks, or other intermezzos). This all seems very simple until you add all three elements into one position, and suddenly the position becomes exceedingly difficult to calculate. So pay attention...you'll need to know this later!!

First let's consider value.  To create an equal threat you need to consider the value of both pieces involved in the threat.  Let's start simple.  Say a pawn is attacking your queen.  An equal threat would be to attack your opponent's queen with one of your pawns:

So far so good. But now let's look at how the next element impacts value, which is when the piece you are counterattacking against is defended.  Like in the above example, since both queens were undefeneded it actually did not matter what we used to counter-attack.  However, when the target piece is defended the value of piece you use to counterattack becomes VERY important.  Take the following position.

Like the first position, the white queen is attacked by a pawn and white can counterattack against the black queen using his pawns (on f3 or h3) or his knight.  If the black queen was not defended, it wouldn't matter which piece white chooses.  However, since the black queen is defended the value of your counterattacking piece is extremely important!

Now let's add in the final element of tempos.  Here we have three key elements of tempo (time) that impact counterattacks:  turn to move, capture-checks, and intermezzos.

There might be a better way of explaining this (I haven't seen it explained very well anywhere else), but the idea "turn to move" is that after the first set of captures there are more captures on the board, or some sort of tactic.  Here is a simple example:

Again, white's queen was attacked by a pawn and, since the black queen was defended, he counterattacked with the same value piece (pawn, instead of knight).  However, after the queens came off the board it was BLACK's turn to move and he simply captured white's knight!  Always keep this in mind when considering equal counterattacks -- if you're the defender, just remember it will be your OPPONENT's move after the initial captures.  I'm interested in reading Victor Charushin's book The Steeplechase to see how he treats this issue.

The next tempo element is capture-checks.  Capture-checks can occur at any point in a sequence of moves, and it is extremely important to remember that after you (or your opponent) use your move to deal with the check, it goes back to being your opponent's move again.  Use this to your advantage and make a point of noting and prioritizing capture-checks in your calculations.  Here's another simple example to demonstrate the idea:

Here white's queen is attacked by black's knight and, since the black queen is defended, he tries to create an equal threat by attacking black's defended queen with an equal valued piece.  But due to the capture-check, white only has time to deal with the check and has no time to follow through with his own counterattack!

The final element of tempo is intermezzos (also known as "zwischenzug", or in-between moves).  This is when your opponent is able to get out of the threat you created by creating another, more powerful threat, thrown in the middle of your variation.  It is essentially a counterattack.  Here are two simple examples using our topic of equal threats:


Here we have the same position from the beginning of this post where the white queen is attacked by a black pawn, and white creates an equal counterattack against black's queen with his own pawn. But this time black plays the in-between capture check (Qxg2+) winning white's pawn, before capturing the queen. This type of move is also called desperado, which is when you have a piece that is going to be captured and "sacrifice" the piece for the most valuable piece you can.  In this case the important issue is time, so the even though the pawn on g2 is not worth much, the time gained from the check is what is truly valuable.  [Thanks Tomasz for pointing that out!]

This next position shows another simple example of an in-between move:


Here again we have the same position from the beginning of this post where the white queen is attacked by a black pawn, and white creates an equal counterattack with his own pawn...only this time he chose the wrong pawn and black played the in-between check, moving the queen to safety, before taking white's queen.

The last position I'll share combines all three ideas of creating an equal counterattack (value of the pieces, defended targets, and time).  Enjoy!!