🔵 My Chessable Courses: https://chessable.com/drcan
♟️ Find me on Chess.com: canka19
♟️ Find me on Lichess: cantosh
🏆 2022 Chessable Community Author of the Year! https://www.chessable.com/blog/announ...
🏆 2023 Chessable Best Tactics Course of the Year! https://www.chessable.com/fundamental...

Connect on   / kabadayichess  

Go Chessable Pro using this link to support the channel: https://chessable.com/drcanpro

00:00 When the Pawn Serves a Great Function
02:50 Avoiding Chess Crimes
06:00 Material and Time
07:52 Schulten - Morphy (1857)
11:21 Homework Position

Our beautiful game has three dimensions: material, quality, and time. Players break rating barriers when they grasp these three dimensions and stop evaluating positions based purely on the material. Everyone can count material, thus most chess players base their evaluations only on this dimension. However, the quality aspects such as king safety and piece activity are often more important than the material (checkmate ends the game after all).

This video shows positions that are designed to improve your evaluation skills and help you accurately engage in trade-offs between those three dimensions. When one of your pawns is attacked by the enemy pieces, you should not only assume a passive mindset and blindly defend that pawn. You should ask whether that pawn is worth defending, and whether you can ditch that pawn and gain other advantages in return. You should judge whether that pawn is serving a good function in increasing the quality of your position, and whether by passively defending that pawn, you are reducing the quality of your position. This way, you are fighting against materialism too.

I have seen players breaking rating barriers when they started grasping these three dimensions and went beyond the material dimension. That usually happens around 1500 ELO, according to my observations. Until that point, only the material dimension dominates their evaluations and they cannot easily envision the possibility of giving up a pawn to gain advantages in time or quality.

Schulten - Morphy (1857): https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess...