Chess and the Art of Distraction!

On Monday afternoon I held my second chess coaching session at the "Board Room" games cafe in Nishi Hiroshima. (I posted a report about the first session here: https://hive.blog/hive-147010/@hirohurl/my-first-chess-coaching-session-in-nishi-hiroshima .)

This time I took one of my favourite chess books, "Zauberwelt Der Kombination" ("Magical World of Combinations"), by the amazing Jackow Neistadt (1923-2023), who served as a Soviet platoon commander in World War Two and was twice wounded in action. After the war he was a master chess player and chess magazine editor. He ended up as the editor of the German language Sportsverlag publishing company through which he published Zuberwelt Der Kombination and many other chess-related books, all in German.

Zauberwelt Der Kombination was a gift to me from my German girlfriend's father way back in 1988. He was a keen club player in Munich back in the day.

My chess student is Japanese and does not speak German, but our host, John, is from Switzerland and fluent in German and French, so I thought it would be fun to work with a German chess book, which is in any case an excellent book for chess training sessions.

Ablenkung: The Art of Distraction

The theme of the training session was "Ablenkung," which can be translated as "deflection" or, as I prefer, "distraction."

The art of distraction in chess is all about inducing your opponent to move a piece away from a crucial square (or row, or rank, or diagonal) so that you can gain an advantage or, as in the two examples that we studied on page 11, win the game.

Of course, there are other ways to distract your oppenent, some of which I deploy in my alter ego guise as the #PubChessBluffer when playing in pubs, bars, and other social venues. These include:

1. On the board, set up a fake threat that your opponent responds to, thereby weakening his position.

2. On the board, pretend that your gambit is actually a blunder. Facepalming oneself, resorting to a large swig of beer and talking about your pate being addled today usually does the trick.

3. Off the board, casually ask your opponent a question on a topic that you know will excite or trigger him and increase the odds that he distract himself by his own chatter. (I have one chess friend who has a penchant for talking about his adventures with the fair sex, so all I need to do is ask him how he got on with so-and-so the other night to raise the odds of distracted play!)

4. Off the board, draw a third person who isn't as good at chess as he likes to think into commenting about the state of play on the board, all the time implying that your own position is a bit shaky.

None of this would work against a genuine master of on-board Ablenkung, such as our man, Jackow Neistadt, who, having survived the battles of Kharkov, Krivoy Rog, Kirovograd, and Moldova, went on to become a chess master and stayed actively involved with the chess world right into his nineties. Amazing bloke, to whom I raise a glass.

Cheers!

David Hurley
#InspiredFocus

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