Send Me Your Brilliancies!
"Chess is 99% tactics", said Richard Teichmann (pictured here). And combinations are the soul of tactics. Silman defines a combination in his marvelous text How to Reassess Your Chess where he writes, "A combination is a sacrifice combined with a forced sequence of moves, which exploits specific peculiarities of the position in the hope of attaining a certain goal."
The chess.com tactics trainer informs us that the tactical puzzles presented come from our own games right here on the site. If that is so, then many of you are clever indeed, and I'd like to expose your cleverness for the benefit of all.
With that in mind, I am hereby soliciting your best tactical combinations. I'll select my favorites among all submissions, and write a blog featuring the BOBs (Best Of the Best).
[Note on March 6, 2008: Please do not send me any more entries. I have already posted the blog that I discuss here. If you would like me to do a Part 2 in a similar way, then please send me a message and request it. -KG]
Here are the submission guidelines:
1. Send your complete game in pgn format to my chess.com email. You can obtain the pgn file from your chess.com game archive.
2. Include a note in your email to tell me which move is the beginning of your brilliancy.
3. Please also tell me your rating at the time of the game. I will use this information to help me select the featured combinations. After all, a given combination might be rather dull if your rating is 2050, but the same one could be spectacular if you are a 1050 player.
Skill and insight are relative.
4. I will change the name of your opponent to make them anonymous, unless they also send me an email giving me permission to keep their real name.
I am not sure if I will be bombarded with games or not, but if I am, then it will take me a while to work through all of them. In any case, if you'd like to know the progress of this project, I'll post regular updates on my profile page, so please check there.
One final thing...please do not send me some famous game that is actually not yours, like Morphy's opera game or something. You might get it past me and get it into the blog, but you'll just make yourself look like the foolish one. If you have your own brilliance, send it. If not, then play more games and get one!
Now send me those games! I look forward to sharing them with the world.
-Kurt
