Chess Training for Club Players

Hello again! It's been a while, for reasons best not dwelt on. I however am well: starting a new low-carbs diet, and generally eating healthier with the goal of eventually losing significant weight but in slow and steady fashion. But in the past few days I've been setting training exercises for a buddy of mine on Chesscube, whose rating there exceeds 2200 and certainly is a good positional player. As for what his real rating/ECF would be, we can't say - he's not played in real life yet. Suffice it to say he's very opposite to me though, and in the work we've undertook so far he tends to play positionally above all, as opposed to trying to find wild noisy ways to continue positions.

He asked me to give him a series of exercises taken from my own games on Cube, many of which last year (as discussed in Olympic Summer) led to the sort of 'White to play and convert tactically' position that he wanted to practice. However, scanning through a set of my games from the last few years (since I became a newly minted 129 in 2009) revealed other very interesting positions and exercises for him. Of course, I therefore have to complete the exercises myself (those I haven't already self-answered, or in some cases, lost the annotations for, thanks to two great crashes inside a year on my old desktop...thanks Microsoft >.< ) and this got me to thinking that I could post them here, and give you guys a chance to train yourselves, and a chance to show my own abilities in a variety of ways that go beyond game annotation per se, therefore getting feedback from you.

Accordingly, let's plough on with the first exercise, which is aimed at anyone trying to improve the quality and depth of their analysis ability, in terms of both greater observation, more avoidance of positional errors, or, for the more advanced player, calculation exercises to supply a Principal Variation.

As the weeks go by more exercises will be added - for now this will supplant annotated game presentations on my parallel Youtube channel, since it provides greater variety of challenge, though rest assured I have many interesting games to present by video.


Your mission, whether you choose to accept it or not, is to take the position after  
1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nf6 3. Bg5 Ne4 4. Bf4 c5 5. e3 Nc6 6. Bb5 Qa5+ 7. Nc3 Nxc3 8. Bxc6+ bxc6

And analyse the consequences of  9. Qd2.

Black to move. Analyse until quiescence, by hand or visualisation if you want a challenge.

By analysis I mean moving pieces around with a board (unless you are masochist/strong enough to attempt this challenge as a Stoyko/visualisation exercise too), for as long as is necessary and/or desired, writing down all your analysis, until you feel you have found the best line (or lines) of play for both sides, and have evaluated all branches, until quiescence (a position is reached where there are no further immediate forcing or threatening tactics that must be dealt with). Also please be sure to include any tactical sub-lines that have error moves for one or other side to the same level as if you were using your analysis to teach or train someone else. This last part can sometimes be especially important in analysis sessions.

In a few days I will share my analysis with you, which I have already done and which amounts to just over a screen's worth in height in a normal Fritz window. In the meantime, if you wish me to share and expound upon your work, you can email your end work to me at daniel.a.odowd@gmail.com . Be reminded that for any of you who are graded over 155 or thereabouts, it may be the case that your analysis is more complete or refined than mine - certainly it will be interesting to discuss such differences here.

As usual, a few reminders, please no engine use and please no comments about any engine saying this, that or the other about this position. That teaches nothing for anyone (: Secondly, if you do email analysis, I'd be very interested to hear your thought process too: did you reject certain moves on any basis (this means ANY basis no matter how stupid sounding it may be outside your own head, because part of this exercise is to measure our thought processes and their qualitative difference); whether you assess certain positions differently to me.

I hope this challenge inspires a good response!