Universal Chess

Training
First edition 2020 by Thinkers Publishing
Copyright © 2020 Wojciech Moranda

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a re-
trieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission from
the publisher.

All sales or enquiries should be directed to Thinkers Publishing, 9850 Landegem,

Belgium.

Email: info@thinkerspublishing.com
Website: www.thinkerspublishing.com

Managing Editor: Romain Edouard

Assistant Editor: Daniël Vanheirzeele

Typesetting: Mark Haast

Proofreading: Chris Tilling

Software: Hub van de Laar

Cover Design: Iwan Kerkhof

Graphic Artist: Philippe Tonnard

Production: BESTinGraphics

ISBN: 9789492510907

D/2020/13730/19
Universal Chess Training

Wojciech Moranda

Thinkers Publishing 2020

 Key to Symbols

! a good move ⩲ White stands slightly better

? a weak move ⩱ Black stands slightly better
!! an excellent move ± White has a serious advantage
?? a blunder ∓ Black has a serious advantage
!? an interesting move +- White has a decisive advantage
?! a dubious move -+ Black has a decisive advantage
□ only move → with an attack
N novelty ↑ with initiative
⟳ lead in development ⇆ with counterplay
⨀ zugzwang ∆ with the idea of
= equality ⌓ better is
∞ unclear position ≤ worse is
© with compensation for the + check
sacrificed material # mate
 Table of Contents

Key to Symbols ..........................................................................................................4

Introduction ...............................................................................................................7

Chapter 1 – What every Russian schoolboy solves................................................17

Solutions ..................................................................................................................27

Chapter 2 – Enter at your own risk: Puzzles may bite .........................................119

Solutions ................................................................................................................129

Chapter 3 – Grandmasters wept solving these ....................................................235

Solutions ................................................................................................................245
 Introduction

I. What is the purpose of this book?

I have always considered chess to be a difficult game to learn, especially for those
of us who are mostly self-taught. The literally endless number of motifs, patterns
or variations may seem overwhelming for many players. And then there is the need
to apply this knowledge in practice. When confronted with such a vast amount of
data, people tend very quickly to start looking for more general points of reference,
or maybe even shortcuts intended to put them on the fast-track to mastery.

Before reaching the GM title at the age of 21 I used to be very principled, digesting
book after book. I purchased whatever title appeared on the market – this was my
method. With little or no access to professional coaching services, I believed that
hard work (understood as memorizing idea after idea and maneuver after
maneuver) would eventually pay off. There was little or no order within this
‘learning process’, nor was there any understanding of how to apply this knowledge
in a tournament game. To give you an example, I knew every single pawn-structure
that was ever discussed in textbooks, but I still felt lost like a babe in the woods
whenever my games diverged from these studied structures.

Only when I started training others in my early twenties, as probably the youngest
coach in the history of the Polish National Youth Chess Academy, did I discover that
this ‘learning process’ was not the way. I witnessed some players working as I did
in the past – training extremely hard, but only seeing the fruits of their labours after
a long period of time. Indeed, so long that they were discouraged from further
work. This experience as a young coach taught me one very important lesson: the
training regime of every single player needs to be not only organized around
whatever might be taking place on the board (plans and ideas in various stages of
the game), but should also cover more concrete topics pertaining to thought
processes and decision making.

Over time, this prompted me to develop my own training system. It enabled me to

guide my students on their path to chess improvement in a systematic manner.
Nowadays, and as a coach at my own chess school, I prepare the curricula of my
pupils in accordance with the rule of ‘three tiers’:
 Exemplary training curriculum
Tier 1: Tier 2: Tier 3:
Core Training Personalized Program Universal Chess Training
Basic elements that need Targeted exercises, Thought processes and
to be understood by customized to the needs decision making in
every single player, of the specific player and practice, whether this
irrespective of their designed to eliminate infers the application of
playing strength and their particular flaws knowledge or not
current knowledge

Creating a distinct methodology for Tiers 1 and 2 was child’s play, but how about
Tier 3? To devise something truly instructive in this area I investigated a few
thousand games of my students. My purpose was to seek to establish what type of
mental mistakes they made most frequently. The results of my research surprised
me. I discovered that whether the given player was rated 1600 or 2500 they were
all most likely to experience difficulties when making use of the following five skills:
1. Anticipation & Prophylaxis
2. Attack & Defense
3. Coordination
4. Statics & Dynamics
5. Weakness
Statistically speaking, the above five skills were involved in more than 80% of the
strategic problems my students were facing in their games. I quickly realized that
mastering these five skills would mean that only 20%, or every fifth problem, would
potentially come as a surprise to them. Taking an important exam and knowing
upfront 80% of the material discussed therein sounds like quite a competitive edge
to me!

As you can tell by now these skills are not something particularly concrete, but
rather a general set of skills. Moreover, they are necessary if you are to learn the
skill of handling your pieces properly. It will enable you to apply all the knowledge
you have in practice. However, calling them ‘soft skills’ is not sufficient. I, therefore,
prefer to speak of them as ‘Universal Chess Training’, because knowing them will
most certainly help you play a good move whether the position seems familiar or
not.

And this is exactly what this book is all about. Below you will find a short
introduction to the essentials of these five aspects. It presents basic knowledge that
will not only enhance your results but also facilitate your ability to negotiate the
rest of this book. The information given below represents merely a quantum of
knowledge conveyed herein: every single game is meant to bring you deeper and
deeper into the discussed subject matter.

II. Universal Chess Training

1. Anticipation & Prophylaxis

Anticipation is the ability to predict the future, to foresee the consequences of

one’s actions. Prophylaxis, on the other hand, represents the habit of constantly
asking yourself ‘What does my opponent want to do?’ and/or ‘How is the opponent
going to respond to these intended actions of mine?’. Those are questions that may
(and should!) be asked all the time and paying attention to the answers will very
rarely let you down.

Those skills are so valuable because chess as such is all about being able to tell the
future. If you can do that you are already halfway prepared for what is about to
come. In case you are wondering, the difference between anticipation and
prophylaxis is as follows: prophylaxis infers the possibility of preventing the
opponent’s intentions. Anticipation rather emphasizes the importance of
understanding the direction in which the game is going.

Prophylaxis tends to have a negative psychological effect on the opponent, it is very

difficult to play if your opponent predicts your actions in advance and prevents
whatever you might be up to. At the same time, we must not forget that this is not
a purely defensive weapon at all. More often than not, anticipation is going to
assure us that it is the right time to attack, or even compel us to do so, otherwise
we may face some hardships ourselves.

2. Attack & Defense

Attacking and defending are like reflections in a mirror. The same set of rules
applies to both situations, with the only difference being perspective. In other
words, when attacking, we are advised to include as many pieces as we can. If we
are defending, however, we are doing the exact thing albeit with a slightly
alternative goal: namely to exchange pieces to reduce the opponent’s attacking
potential.
Both approaches stem from the very same principle, known widely in chess
literature as the ‘Attack-Defense-Ratio’. In plain terms, the Attack-Defense-Ratio
represents the difference between the number of pieces taking part in the attack
and the number of pieces defending. If the difference is 2 or more the chances for
success are relatively high. If it is lower than 2 do not even try! The reason for this
is as follows: whenever you start an attack you need to take into consideration that
the number of your pieces present on the board might decrease at quite a rapid
pace, whether through possible exchanges or sacrifices. The surplus of 2 or more
pieces means that, at the end of the day when the opponent’s king is left alone and
defenseless, you will still have enough forces at your disposal to mate him.

Obviously, this is a very crude rule and a multitude of reservations need to be

mentioned. First, the issue is not solely about the quantity of the pieces taking part
in the attack, but also about their quality. For example, you usually would not want
to start an onslaught against a black king castled kingside without a knight drifting
somewhere around the f5-square. Also, the coordination of your forces cannot be
underestimated either. The last thing you want to see is a large number of your
pieces failing to storm the barricades of the opponent’s inferior position simply
because his defensive arrangement happens to be better organized.

3. Coordination

Coordination means the number of possibilities your pieces happen to enjoy in a

given position. This can pertain to a single piece or many pieces altogether. The
most famous derivative of this rule is the principle of the weakest piece. According
to this principal it takes only one piece of yours to be ‘bad’ to spoil your entire
position. For this reason, the principle of the weakest piece should be considered
as a practical guideline. Whenever you have time during a game, you may want to
consider how to improve your weakest piece. Examples of ‘bad’ pieces include the
light-squared bishop in the French Defense and knights on the edge of the board.
But make sure that you do not follow this rule blindly. After all, some hypermodern
openings like the King’s Indian Defense may surprise you in this respect more than
once.

In this book we divide the means required to improve the coordination of pieces
into two groups: static and dynamic. Static means bringing one of your pieces to
greener pastures. For example, re-routing White’s dark-squared bishop in the
Winawer to the splendid a3-square. Such endeavors clearly improve the situation
on the board, but usually affect only the coordination of the piece involved.
Dynamic means, on the other hand, imply a drastic change to the character of the
position, leading to a global modification of the capabilities of all of your pieces.
This can happen in the form of a pawn-lever (e.g. the ...e6-e5 push in the French
Defense), or after the material balance becomes disturbed (e.g. after a positional
exchange-sacrifice on c3 in the Sicilian Defense).

Because chess involves two players, it is not only the coordination of your own
pieces that need to be taken care of. You may also need to dedicate some time to
spoiling the efforts of your opponent. If you can kill two birds with one stone, that
would be even better!

4. Statics & Dynamics

To speak of things ‘static’ in chess means everything that is stable and subject to
changes only under a considerable amount of force, e.g. the pawn-structure or the
material balance in an otherwise calm position. Enjoying a static edge usually
implies that if nothing changes this type of advantage is going to allow us to bring
the full point home without any undue adventures. By comparison ‘dynamics’ take
place in a game of chess when the balance is disturbed, e.g. when one of the players
sacrifices material for something intangible be it an attack or initiative. The nature
of a dynamic edge tends to be ephemeral – it can be raging at a given moment only
to disappear completely two moves later if mishandled.

The above distinction is not only of theoretical importance as we must be able to

grasp what kind of position we have in front of us. It means that we will know when
we need to change the nature of the position. Suppose we are being dominated by
our opponent and we need to break his progress. When doing so, however, there
are two guidelines that need to be followed:

a. If our opponent has a strategically superior position (e.g. due to a smaller

amount of pawn-weaknesses in his camp), you would usually be advised to
‘wiggle’, that is to destabilize the position by seeking tactical/dynamic
opportunities.
b. However, when finding yourself under dynamic pressure (e.g. when under
attack or when the opponent has the initiative), the best way of countering
this will be to drain the activity out of the opponent’s position. If successful,
whatever remains of the position afterwards should favor us, especially if
it was positionally advantageous for us from the start.
5. Weakness

In general, a ‘weakness’ represents an element of the position which is not

defended well enough. Moreover, this weakness should be defended due to its
importance for the assessment of the position as a whole. There can be as many
types of weaknesses as there are elements in chess: pawns, pieces, files, ranks,
diagonals, even a whole color complex of squares can be a weakness. What is even
more interesting, there are elements in chess that are considered weak or strong
relative to the stage of the game (an IQP in the middlegame/endgame) or the
nature of the pawn-structure (bishop-pair in open/closed positions).

There is one more thing that needs to be mentioned in the context of weaknesses.
Namely, if you are ever struggling to find a plan during the game, focus your
attention on the weaknesses in the position. It is not a coincidence that more
experienced players repeatedly say that ‘If you see a weakness, you already have a
plan!’. The weaknesses of your opponent may represent some kind of inducement
for you to start active action. However, in the absence of such weaknesses, there is
nothing wrong in fixing whatever holes you see in your position before embarking
on actions directed strictly at your foe.

III. How to work with this book?

I am a huge fan of the science of life optimization, in ‘maxing out’ whatever I can
achieve in every aspect of life to which I turn my attention. Because of that, the
book that you have in your hands is constructed in a very specific manner. Here are
a few principles that I followed while writing it in order to make sure that you profit
from it the most:

1. Original content: One specific difficulty related to studying chess as a whole is

the lack of high-quality material on the market. There are, in fact, some very good
publishing houses out there but if you are serious about chess you will soon notice
the limited number of books that have actually enriched you as a player. What is
even worse, after a while you will notice that examples tend endlessly to repeat
themselves. For some strange reason, many authors seem to love repeating games
from the past, despite them having been commented on in other sources numerous
times before. Another typical ‘sin’ of chess-authors is to give their workbook a
concrete title (e.g., ‘Prophylaxis’), when perhaps only 25% of their material is
strictly relevant to their topic. They offer valuable training material, but the
remaining 75% function merely as padding. Additionally, even today many
examples cited in books are not checked with engines, which means that they are
objectively incorrect or feature two or three alternative solutions. Given all of this,
you might sometimes feel demotivated before even starting.

Why anyone would produce books like that beats me. But I do know that working
with such books is not going to profit you as much as analyzing original, well-
annotated content. Hence, I decided that this book is going to be different. The 90
games selected for this book have been cherry-picked out of thousands, without
resorting to other books or commentaries available online. Most of them come
from the years 2018-2019; only a handful are slightly older. Simply put what you
are getting here is value for what you paid.

2. Three levels of difficulty: This book is aimed to benefit a very wide chess audience
starting from 1600 upwards. The first part, titled ‘What every Russian schoolboy
solves’ is aimed at players rated 1600-1900. It also includes the highest number of
motifs considered ‘typical’ in modern chess-literature. The second part (‘Enter at
your own risk: Puzzles may bite’) is designed for 1900-2200 players. They are,
therefore, more complex in nature. The third and last section is titled
‘Grandmasters wept solving these’... and there is a reason for this. The only thing I
can say about them without spoiling the fun is that they require the highest level of
abstract thinking to be solved.

Although I did my best to sort these games in an order based on their complexity,
this division remains very subjective. Some of the exercises from the first part are
not necessarily much easier than the ones designed for more experienced players.
At the same time aspiring amateurs stand a chance at solving the entirety of the
puzzles in every chapter. That said, some of the finer points here and there will
likely remain harder to grasp. Knowledge is surely going to help you out sometimes,
but because the majority of examples are, in a certain sense, innovative, what will
matter most if how good a chess-thinker you are.

3. Mixed exercises with no hints: To further advance your learning curve I decided
that the puzzles should not be sorted according to themes. They are only sorted
according to difficulty. In my view offering a hint about the topic of a given exercise
will bias the person solving them, and in so doing neutralize the learning effect. As
a result, you will not know beforehand what the given exercise is all about and
which of the skills mentioned above will be useful in solving it. It follows that
training with this book will resemble a practical game as much as possible. The
solutions, however, will not only indicate the underlying idea behind each puzzle,
but will also elaborate in detail upon both the suggested continuation and, very
often, on additional problems of practical value that could also be meaningful in
the given case.

4. Focus on what remained behind the scenes: The average playing strength of the
chess populace may, indeed, be rising globally. But it has still been an arduous task
to find suitable training material. The book that you are holding represents the
result of approximately 400 hours of hard work with a quarter of these hours
dedicated exclusively to the selection of games. It became apparent at the
beginning of the process that full games, as played even by strong grandmasters,
are marred by bad mistakes, and therefore seldom represent solid training
material. Although some model games played at the board are still going to be
included, the vast majority of the examples in this book start only the moment one
of the players missed a great resource. There will be a particular focus on explaining
what went wrong and how this mistake could have been avoided or the play
improved upon. As most of the games constitute high-profile encounters, every
puzzle you solve is simultaneously going to mean that you did better than a strong
grandmaster!

IV. Acknowledgements

This book would not have been published had it not been for the invaluable help of
a few people that I would like to mention.

First of all, I would like to thank my parents for their love and never-ending support.
Without them I would never have been able to pursue my chess passion.

A special thanks also goes to my dear wife who was kind enough to take over most
of the duties relating to the care of our infant daughter when I was writing – you
are a real hero!

Furthermore, I cannot help but mention students of my chess school, most notably
Phillip Eltakchi, Kyron Griffith, Daniel Maxwell and Sebastian Mueer. I cordially
thank them for all the invaluable advice and comments, which inspired me to go
the extra mile more than once.
Lastly, I would like to thank you for purchasing this book to spend some quality time
herein – may you find it both instructive and entertaining.

Any comments or criticism you might have is very much welcome and can be sent
to my e-mail address: wojciech.moranda@gmail.com.

GM Wojciech Moranda
Wroclaw, September 2020
 Chapter One
What every Russian
schoolboy solves
18 Universal Chess Training

 1  2
Winterberg – Lubbe Shahinyan – Minasian
Magdeburg 2019 Yerevan 2019

 22.?  23...?

 3  4
Demchenko – Jones Lagarde – Colin
St Petersburg 2018 Brest 2019

 23...?  19...?
Chapter 1: What every Russian schoolboy solves 19

 5  6
Zanan – Boruchovsky Nguyen – Yip
Israel 2019 Saint Louis 2019

 17.?  25.?

 7  8
Guseva – Styazhkina Moranda – Robson
Sochi 2019 chess.com 2019

 40.?  29...?
20 Universal Chess Training

 9  10
Gasanov – Melkumyan Solozhenkina – Korneev
St Petersburg 2018 Sochi 2019

 40...?  30...?

 11  12
Van Foreest – Stevic Kaspi – Rozentalis
Skopje 2018 Israel 2019

 36.?  39...?
Chapter 1: What every Russian schoolboy solves 21

 13  14
Lewicki – Delchev Simacek – Michalik
Skopje 2018 Ostrava 2019

 14...?  13...?

 15  16
Abdusattorov – Zvjaginsev Srinath – Markus
St Petersburg 2018 Budapest 2019

 42.?  21...?
22 Universal Chess Training

 17  18
Sebag – Rakhmangulova Gaal – Froewis
Antalya 2019 Radenci 2019

 22.?  25...?

 19  20
Zickus – Sakalauskas Tabatabaei – Sethuraman
Lithuania 2019 Makati 2018

 19...?  26.?
Chapter 1: What every Russian schoolboy solves 23

 21  22
Antonsen – Ochsner Bodnaruk – Mikadze
Svendborg 2019 Antalya 2019

 18...?  29...?

 23  24
Krejci – Michalik Pasko – Abdulla
Prague 2019 Batumi 2019

 29...?  11...?
24 Universal Chess Training

 25  26
Bernadskiy – Gschnitzer Strikovic – Mannion
Budapest 2019 Dublin 2019

 31...?  26...?

 27  28
Adams – Kuzubov Muzychuk – Gunina
Wolfhagen 2019 Hengshui 2019

 28.?  17...?
Chapter 1: What every Russian schoolboy solves 25

 29  30
Buksa – Gevorgyan Hovhannisyan – Petrosyan
Astana 2019 Yerevan 2019

 21...?  24.?