Dan Heisman

Is Your Move Safe?

Boston
Contents

Acknowledgements 7
Symbols 8
Introduction 9

Chapter 1: Basic Safety Issues 25

Answers for Chapter 1 33
Chapter 2: Openings 51
Answers for Chapter 2 73
Chapter 3: Middlegame 111
Answers for Chapter 3 138
Chapter 4: Endgame 184
Answers for Chapter 4 200
Chapter 5: How Many Safe Moves? 230
Answers for Chapter 5 244

Bibliography 269
 Is Your Move Safe?

Upon hearing that, my student replied with something indicative

of the way many other students have played:

Well, Dan, I went through all the same logic exactly the same
way you did with one exception. When I saw I had to move the
queen to e7, I did not check to see if that move was safe, so I played
1...Qe7 first, my opponent checked, I lost the bishop, and I lost the
game.

This is not an isolated case and that student was not a beginner.

I had another student who chose to lose a pawn rather than suffer
an isolated pawn(!). While occasionally there are positions where it
is better to lose material than to have a positional weakness, those
are certainly a minority. Until you are a very good player and can
make those infrequent distinctions correctly with a high percentage
of accuracy, its very likely you should just put safety first.

I find the following principle helpful: Strategy is the tiebreak of

equally safe moves.

Get in the habit of first checking if a candidate is safe so you dont

make the same mistake the student did when he played 1...Qe7?.

Strategy will initially help you choose your candidate moves,

but safety usually determines if they remain candidates. I call this
concept Initial and Final Candidate Moves. Initial candidates are
those that do something (offensive or defensive). Final candidates
are subsets of the initial candidates that either pass the safety test
or are willing sacrifices.

Strategy is the tiebreak of equally safe moves.

Determining if a Move Is Safe

Over the course of providing private lessons to about 1,000 play-
ers, I have given many, many Is it safe? problems. Some you will
find in this book.

16
 Introduction

In actual play, students often do not even ask if a candidate is

safe, which certainly makes it difficult to determine if it is. There-
fore, the first step in finding out if a move is safe is the willingness
to consistently check for its safety!

I am not going to do an extensive discourse on how to determine

move safety here in the Introduction. To some extent, thats what
the remainder of this book, as well as every tactics book ever writ-
ten, are partially trying to do. But I should provide an overview of
some of the issues involved in finding piece safety. This I will do
below and continue through some initial problems in Chapter 1,
Basic Safety Issues.

Another reason weaker players often do not find that a move

is safe is that they depend too much on their pattern recognition,
especially defensively, when determining if their own candidate is
safe. From this aspect, the three ways one can determine whether
a move is safe are:

Purely pattern recognition this almost exclusively occurs

in the early opening or late endgame when the exact pattern
studied appears on the board,

A mixture of pattern recognition and analysis; this is the

most common case. A position might have elements closely
or loosely resembling those that were studied before. Once
recognition is made, careful analysis is required to determine,
Is the answer to this moves safety the same as the similar
position that I studied previously?

Pure analysis there is no similar pattern studied previously,

or at least none that is triggered by examining the current po-
sition. In this case, careful analysis is required to determine if
the move is safe. You cant assume a move is safe just because
you dont immediately recognize any danger.

You cannot always tell which of the three is required. For ex-
ample, you may think that your opponent has fallen into a book
opening trap (pure pattern recognition) and that his move is not

17
 Is Your Move Safe?

safe. However, unless the position is identical to the one you studied,
it may be that the trap does not work if even one piece is in a slightly
different position. Therefore, when in doubt, never rely purely on
pattern recognition.

Pattern recognition study (tactics, openings, endgames) is neces-

sary and extremely helpful; however, it is usually not sufficient. Even
in patterns that seem identical to something studied previously, it
makes sense to ask, Does the solution I remember really work in
this position? and augment with double-checking analysis. This
takes time, which is one reason those who play faster chess on the
internet often have trouble developing the skills and habits which
would help them become strong over-the-board players in slower
time controls.

When you are doing a puzzle, you are told if the previous move
was not safe, i.e. White to play and win. In a game, you have to
determine the safety situation on each move and for each candi-
date move.

The keys to seeing that a move might not be safe are certain
danger patterns in a position such as loose pieces, a weak back
rank, or an exploitable geometric pattern like two pieces lined up
for a pin or skewer. I call these the Seeds of Tactical Destruction,
but other authors have different names.

No matter what you call these seeds, a position must possess

them if there is to be a tactic. World Champion Steinitz correctly
postulated that you need something wrong with the opponents posi-
tion to win material; you cant make something out of nothing just
by your brilliance (although if the safety issue is obscure enough,
it may require great brilliance to discover it!).

Contrarily, if those seeds do exist, that does not mean there has
to be a tactic. In my book Back to Basics: Tactics, I included a chap-
ter of puzzles called, Is There a Tactic?, meaning that the side to
move may or may not have a tactic, even though seeds existed in
every position.

18
 Introduction

If a move is not safe, it will require a forcing move in response to

win the material or mate. These forcing moves are the responding
players checks, captures, and threats.

For example, when you are determining if a candidate move is

safe, you have to consider the opponents checks, captures, and
threats to see if one of these can force the win of material or mate.
A threat that can be met is not a tactic. Similarly, to determine if
your opponents move is not safe, you have to consider your own
checks, captures, and threats to see if one of them can forcibly win
material or mate.

Unless a position is unclear, you usually have to analyze to qui-

escence before you can come to a conclusion and evaluate. A qui-
escent position is one where further checks, captures, and threats
either do not exist, or further analysis of them would not change
the evaluation of the position.

As an absurd example, you would not analyze that you could

capture your opponents queen, stop analyzing, and conclude you
are ahead a queen if the opponent had a simple recapture of your
queen!

As a more practical example, suppose you analyze that you lose

your queen but dont get sufficient compensation or mate in return.
At that point, you can stop your analysis and reject that candidate.
You can do so even if analyzing further forcing moves after that
point might reveal that you could eventually win, say, a pawn.

In most positions, you dont have to know how many moves are
safe. But you do have to determine if each of your candidate moves
is safe (and if not, are you willing to sacrifice?).

In certain defensive situations, it is efficient to ask, How many

safe moves do I have? before trying to find the best one. But in
most normal situations once you have determined that your
candidate moves are safe, it is a waste of time to know what other
safe moves you have.

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 Is Your Move Safe?

Determining if a candidate move is safe is necessary, but it is not

sufficient for determining which move you want to play. The move
actually played is often the best one you can find in a reasonable
amount of time. Moreover, in many non-critical positions, especially
dead-drawn positions, any safe move might do.

Determining whether a move is not safe may require skills and

knowledge that range from simple pattern recognition to world-class
analysis. Partly for this reason, I could not include all easy prob-
lems nor all extremely difficult ones. The problems will range from
relatively trivial to quite difficult, but most are fairly challenging. I
hope that almost all the problems will also prove thought-provoking
and instructive.

Value of the Pieces

For purposes of Is it safe? evaluation, we have to determine a

baseline of what constitutes losing material. Beginners and some
intermediates often use the popular 1-3-3-5-9 valuation system
(which I call the Reinfeld system in honor of the prolific 20th
century American author Fred Reinfeld) for average piece values.

We shall use a more accurate value system that was determined

via computer analysis by GM Larry Kaufman, most recently noted in
his book The Kaufman Repertoire for Black & White (Whites p. 12):

Pawn = 1
Knight = 3.5
Bishop = 3.5
Rook = 5.25
Queen = 10
Bonus of 0.5 pawns for the bishop pair (one side has two
bishops and the other does not)

Using GM Kaufmans system, if the difference in the total value

between each sides traded pieces comes out to a quarter-pawn
or less, that would usually be considered a fair trade. More than

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 Basic Safety Issues

In chess, it is easy to generate unstoppable threats. That

means if you dont look for your opponents checks, captures,
and threats that he can make in reply to your candidate move,
it is entirely possible you will make a move like 1...Qxb5 and
your opponent will counter with an unstoppable threat that
will win the game. In this case I purposely picked a very fa-
miliar mating pattern so that 2.Qh6 would jump out at you
if I asked about 1...Qxb5. But not every unstoppable threat is
so easily spotted...

Its extremely important and helpful to study basic tactical

patterns. Thats not news. Pattern recognition should help
prevent you from making a move like 1...Qxb5. The more
patterns you know, the better. But you cant rely on only
knowing those patterns; spotting the opponents tactics in
reply to your move often requires careful analysis. And even in
well-known positions like this, once you spot 1...Qxb5 2.Qh6,
you still should double-check to make sure Black would have
no defense. Even for common patterns, double-checking
at the very least with careful analysis is always sensible,
except in speed games. Theres too much riding on making
one huge mistake.

Answer 1-5
White to play: Which of the following are safe?
a) 1.Be3 b) 1.Nc3 c) 1.c4
XIIIIIIIIY
9-+ktr-+-tr0
9+pzp-vlpzp-0
9p+p+-+p+0
9+-+nzP-+-0
9-+-zP-+P+0
9+-+-+-+P0
9PzPP+-zPK+0
9tRNvL-+R+-0
xiiiiiiiiy
a) Yes, 1.Be3 is safe. If Black plays 1...Nxe3, then 2.fxe3 protects
the d-pawn. Doubling Whites pawns, as explained in the In-
37
 Answers for Chapter 1

troduction, may not be desirable (here it is fine), but doesnt

count as not safe unless it causes White to lose material or get
checkmated. With the d-pawn already guarded, other knight
discoveries such as 1...Nb4 only threatens the c2-pawn, which
can be made safe with, say, 2.Na3.

b) 1.Nc3 would be my first candidate move in this position but

I would have to reject it because it is not safe. No, its not
because of 1...Nxc3 2.bxc3 where the doubled pawn nicely
goes toward the center and guards the important d-pawn. Its
because the discovered attack 1...Nb4! hits both the d-pawn
and the c-pawn, and the c-pawn cannot be saved.
If you failed to find 1...Nb4 when doing the problem, the
following is one way that may have helped you find it. After
1.Nc3, identify which white pieces are not guarded by another
white piece: Kg2, Ra1, c2, d4. But we dont have to worry
about guarded kings, so the other three are loose pieces. How
many Black moves in reply to 1.Nc3 would attack at least two
of these other three (Ra1, c2, d4)? The answer is two: 1...
Nb4 and 1...Ne3+. But 1...Ne3+ itself is not safe, so the move
to be concerned about is 1...Nb4.
It is very instructive to compare the situation in Position
1-4 with 1...Qxb5 with the one here with 1.Nc3. Both allow
unstoppable threats 2.Qh6 and 1...Nb4. While 2.Qh6 in 1-4 is
a mate threat and 1...Nb4 here only wins a pawn, the prin-
ciple of not allowing unstoppable threats through careful play
on the previous move is the same. What differs, however, is
whether or not you can depend on your prior pattern recogni-
tion to prevent making the error. The pattern after 1...Qxb5
2.Qh6 is a purposely well-known one, while the pattern here
after 1.Nc3 Nb4 is a purposely rare one, and unlikely to be in
your mental database of dangerous patterns. Both cases call
for analysis, but whereas 2.Qh6 should jump out at you to
trigger this analysis, usually 1...Nb4 is only found after some
care.

c) Having seen the answer to the previous move (b), it should

come as no surprise that the aggressive 1.c4 also has similar
problems after 1...Nb4, hitting c2 and d4. Even though c2 is

38
 Basic Safety Issues

empty, 2...Nc2 would trap the rook. But any knight move by
White would only save the rook it cant save d4 as well.

Answer 1-6
White to play: Is 1.Qe8+ safe?
XIIIIIIIIY
9-mk-+-+r+0
9zppzp-+-+-0
9q+-+-+-+0
9+-+-+-+-0
9-+-+Q+-+0
9+-+-+-+-0
9-+-+-+-+0
9+K+-tR-+-0
xiiiiiiiiy
This is another easy problem to illustrate a point. Of course
1.Qe8+ is safe, for although it immediately loses a queen for a
rook with 1...Rxe8, White gets mate on the recapture 2.Rxe8#.

This is a problem that only the rawest beginners fail to recognize,

and they soon learn it, too.

This is another example of basic pattern recognition, but with a

specific purpose: to show how to avoid a quiescence error of stop-
ping too soon in the analysis. Here, to stop after 1.Qe8+ because it
loses the queen would be incorrect.

Quiescence errors are one of the biggest problems for intermedi-

ate players. In games if they cant recognize the pattern, they often
stop their analysis and miss pseudo-sacrifices. These same sac-
rifices they would often find when doing a puzzle in a book, where
the guarantee of a solution ensures that if they search further in
some lines it will be worthwhile.

However, relying solely on pattern recognition is the problem;

if you dont recognize a safe pattern, you still should always ask if
further analysis might show the initial sacrifice to be reasonable.
This issue is discussed further in Answer 1-7.
39