Chess Colle Games: The Pin

When I first played the Colle I was told just to play the same moves no matter what Black did, which were 1.d4 2.Nf3 3.e3 4. Bd3 4. Nbd2 5. Qe2 6. 0-0 7.e4. But now that I have been playing it for a while I have to admit I often get lazy and just play those moves by rote, or perhaps it's fear. Fear that I might calculate poorly and find myself in a lost position. But if you really look at the games of Edgar Colle, the man who invented this super solid opening, he deviates from that move order quite often, and the plans he has are deep. Often ten moves deep. So don't you get lazy if you are going to use the Colle. Use it like he did, still calculating just as hard even when you could just relax and move like a robot. Because even if you can get away with that, is that what you really play chess for? Not to have to think?

This game started 1. d4 Nf6 2. Nf3 e6 3. e3 d5 4.Bd3 c5 5.c3 Nc6 6. Nbd2 Be7 7. O-O c4 Bc2 b5 9. e4.

When I played Qe2 as move number 9 under any circumstances it was because I wasn't ready to think, and was learning this system as a beginner, or at least as someone who played like a beginner. I had actually been playing all my life, but was a beginner to real chess, to tournament chess and even club chess, where real chess is played. They used to say, "Does she know how to play?" "She knows how the pieces move." I didn't understand this at the time and thought it was just being insulting. But now it makes more sense. I really didn't know how to play. I just knew how the pieces moved. There is a difference between knowing how to play and just knowing how the pieces moved. When I began playing the Colle I constantly made unsound sacrifices, moved pieces for no reason, just because I didn't know what else to do, pushed a pawn just to do something. Plans I did have were short sighted and ill concieved. There was good reason for me to just simply follow the moves of the Colle blindly and just "get out of the opening" without getting myself into trouble. But that is no excuse to blindly play these moves today. Many a game I have seen these moves like c4 and b5 and would be afraid to think beyond the simple formula I had learned. The Colle has a reputation for being drawish and passive. I wonder if on some level it gets that reputations because there are other players like me who get in the habit of playing these first 8 moves by rote and not thinking, long after they play these moves mechanically. Looking here at this game of Edgar Colle's we see that he plays e4 in this position instead of Qe2. Let's look at why he played this. If we look, we can see that his games are actually quite sharp and aggressive, far from the passive and dull opening the reputation has.

 What you notice in this position is a temporary weakness along th h1-a8 diagonal. If you simply play Qe2 then Black will shore up that weakness and play Bb7, clearly the reason for playing b5, along with his plan to advance his queenside pawns. The only way to immediately create problems for Black here is to play e5 right away, however, I could never see what problems exactly I was creating.  

Early on in my chess training, when I was working with SM David Gliksman, he used to put me through visualization training. I will try to go through this with you, the reader, so follow along. If you play e4, as we are thinking of doing, we are happy if Black ignores it and castles. We can play e5 and close Blacks pieces out of play, while simultaneously opening up the diagonals for our bishops. Beginners might think e5 was just to threaten the knight. That's not the point of the move, but it is nice to dislodge the knight from it's post on f6, as it is one of the only defensive pieces Black has over there, while White has everything and the kitchen sink aimed there. If Black playes e5 there are quite a few possible variations to calculate. And if Black plays dxe4, White plays Nxe4. If Black then plays Nxe4 and White plays Bxe4, then the knight on c6 is pinned. This was the diagram at the beginning of this article. Don't go back and look at it, just picture it in your head. Now, what can Black do to protect that knight, and unpin the rook. Does Bb7 work? What can White do after Bb7? White can play Ne5. (Black can play Nxe5, and we will have to look at that too, later, but in the meantime let's assume that Black tries to defend the knight on c6. Ne5 move threatens to win the piece and, since Black's king is not castled yet, fork the rook as well with Bxc6 +. Now let's say that Black etiher plays Na5 or Rc8, basically protecting the knight twice to avoid losing it. How can White follow up? Can you still see all of this in your head? Take a few moments and try. Here is the diagram, and I will suggest Qf3, or Nxf7 followed by Qf3.

 When you are visualizng and calculating you have to keep eveything organized in your mind. Right now you are calculating only along one specific branch of the tree. We aren't even looking at Nxe5 last move, or at e5, on move 9. But if we jump over to those moves now, our mind flits from possibility to possibility like a butterfly and can't calm down and calculate one variation. So stay with this possibility for now until we see it all the way through, and then if it works, we still don't play the move. We analyze the others.

 Clearly this is good for White. So now we look at other possibilities for Black. We start with Nxe5, since this is still along the branch of 9...dxe4. For clarity we stay with this branch off the dxe5 line so we don't forget to look at it later. We will analyze 9. ...e5 next. So what about 12. ...Nxe5. Visualize that. First the bishop has to make a decision, does it take on b7 right away? Or do we recapture the Knight. Clearly we must capture the bishop, otherwise we lose a piece. Make sure you understand why before we move on. So Bxb7 is aiming at the rook, and so far all we have done is trade. When the rook moves to b8 it will be attacking the bishop on b7, which means that recapturing the knight on e5 does not win us a piece. However, if you look at it, if we move the bishop out of the way, we can chase the rook on the following move with Bishop f5. and if we can then get the Bishop back to b7 we might even win the rook or win the exchange. Visualize it, then look at the diagram.

In order to still threaten the rook, and not give the knight a killer outpost, the bishop must move to e4 where it prevents Nd3. The knight can still move there, but he would lose a pawn and White would be winning. So after Be4 where does the knight move? Visualize the pieces. Try doing all of this from the original position from which we are calculating, that of 9. e4. Pull out your regulation chess set and use the letters and numbers to help you. You can see clearly that the KNight cannot move back to his home on c6, that square is gone. He can't play to d3. He can't play to g4, where the Queen can take him. All that's left for that poor knight is d7 and g6. Like cockroaches, knights without pawns to post to scurry along the walls looking for a place to hide along the floor boards. We have taken care of the knight, and now we can win the rook, via Bf5, followed by Bb7 again. We can conclude that e4 followed by dxe4 is good, now we just have to calculate 9. ...e5.

 It is not easy to quickly look at e5, however, you have worked hard and this has been a very long and tiring hubpage chess lesson. If you have hung in there this far, kudos to you. Let's just look at the e5 diagram and try to figure out on your own what would happen, get out your chess set and move pieces, or use Fritz if you want, and see what happens. Then you can see the rest of the game here.