The reason why I enjoy playing the Colle-Zukertort system so much is that it starts harmless with 1.d4 followed by pretty natural developing moves without threatening much for the first ten moves or so. But then, after Black is lulled into sleep, White can often start a nice kingside attack. The board on the right shows a blitz game I played a couple of days ago on ICC.

I am White, starting one of these potentially vicious attacks. However, for an attack being successful you need two simple things (the nice thing of playing at the patzer level is that you do not have to worry much about the fine print): first and most important of all, your opponent has to make a mistake. Luckily, at the patzer level this happens more often than not. Secondly, you have to recognize the mistake and exploit the resulting weakness. Well, this is one of the games where I had a chance for a tactical shot but did not see it. After the smoke cleared a bit over the battlefield, we see the position after 18. ... Ne4 (you should hopefully see it on the interactive board, if you are using your RSS reader, you might have to load the post in your web browser). Clearly, Black's knight is threatening to capture White's queen. The simple thing to do would have been 19. Nxe4, exchanging knights. However, I was too "smart" and figured I might be able to trick my opponent into a quick mate by playing 19. Qh3 threatening 20. Rh8#. At least I thought so, forgetting a little thing you probably realized already... damn those little pawns, they always surprise me!

Anyway, in the end, I resigned. The postmortem computer run-through showed me that I apparently got into an equal position later on but after losing my rook I was too demoralized to recognize anything. However, I still enjoyed the game: even though I messed up big time, I got a nice attack going giving me some adrenalin rush and some experience that will hopefully convert into a win next time around.

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written by pheadrus, February 18, 2008

Hi Scirius,

Although this accident/oversight is all about chess vision, it bothers me that the scan I propose, would not warn you against Qh4. On the contrary! Spotting h8 as an mating square (target) may have been the main reason for playing Qh3. Also marking Rh6 as a target would not necessarily have made the alarm bells ring. Why should it, the pawn on g7 is pinned, and a second attack on the rook is not in sight.

Of course you could ask yourself: "do I blunder". But that question will not help you very much in most cases, because it does not tell you were to look.

I think the best way to avoid oversights like gxh6, would be to ask yourself before playing Qh3: "what does this move allow him to do?". I think this question would have made you aware of unpinning the g-pawn.

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written by Sciurus, February 18, 2008

Hi Phaedrus,
thanks for the insightful comment! Yes, the scanning process wouldn't have helped here (although I do believe it will help me find weaknesses to focus on). Strange thing was that I was perfectly aware that I could not move the Q from the g-file because it would unpin the pawn. But when I saw that there was a tiny chance to checkmate my opponent, I forgot all about that. Things like that happen to me all the time.

I guess the best thing to do would be like you wrote: to ask myself before each move: "what does this move allow him to do?" I hope that I can make this a habit sometime.

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