The Power of Pressure

How to take your opponents out of their comfort zone

One of my students recently had this position in a tournament game.

Looks like a pretty normal middlegame position, until you realize white has an extra queen. Not even a queen for a rook or something, just a whole queen! He said some other players who were walking around the playing hall did a double take when they saw the position. He promoted his second queen on move 12 and his opponent played on until move 29, so he got the rare chance to play a whole middlegame with two queens. I don’t think I’ve ever had a game like that. And his opponent was rated over 1800.

So how do you make a second queen on move 12 against an 1800 opponent? It started with this quirk line against the Caro Kann.

The big question, of course, is what happens if Black goes into an endgame with 3…dxe4 4. dxe4 Qxd1+. White has some ideas to play for an advantage there, but in this case Black just developed with 3…Bg4, which is also reasonable. He probably thought not much was happening, but my student turned on the heat with 4. h3 Bh5 5. g4 Bg6 6. h4.

White is threatening to snare the bishop with h5, but isn’t e4 hanging?

6... dxe4 7. h5

Anyway!

Now best play for both sides is 7... Bxh5! 8. Nh4! (preparing Nxg6 if the bishop retreats) g5! 9. Bxg5 Qd5 and the line continues with more crazy moves, but of course you’re probably not figuring this out over the board. In the game Black decided to take the knight.

7... exf3 8. hxg6

And here comes the extra queen. At this point Black’s best chance is 8… fxg6 9. Qxf3 when White has the upper hand because of Black’s busted kingside pawn structure, but the game is far from over. Instead Black played 8… Qd5 completely overlooking White’s real threat of 9. Rxh7!

Suddenly, Black has nothing better than to just allow his rook to be taken. He traded rooks after inserting a queen check, but that just made matters worse, because White’s pawn is going through.

9… Qe5+ 10. Be3 Rxh7 11. gxh7

So that’s how he got the extra queen! What’s interesting to me is that I often see players in exactly this rating range around 1800 share games with comments like, “My opponent never made any mistakes!” But in this game we saw an 1800 player fall apart and let his opponent make an extra queen in the opening. What happened?

I think it all comes down to pressure. White’s opening play put a ton of pressure on his opponent before he was ready for it. He had to solve difficult, unconventional problems from an early stage of the game. It wasn’t enough to apply the opening principles of control the center, bring out the pieces, and castle. He had to solve concrete problems that required creative solutions to get out of, and in this game he didn’t manage to do it.

Kasparov said, “The highest art of the chessplayer lies in not allowing your opponent to show you what he can do.” You have a lot of control over how well your opponent plays. Going from 0 to 1600 is largely about cutting out unforced errors. If you have your own house in order, your opponent will often beat themselves. Once you get into the 1600-2000 range, your opponents usually won’t beat themselves without some encouragement. They’ll still make mistakes, but to elicit those mistakes you need to give them difficult problems to solve.