Dealing with lost positions

Intro

Recently I’ve noticed that I apparently became more resilient and creative while playing in bad positions: when I am down a pawn or even a piece. Now I even have a growing collection of “miraculous saves” as I call them — here I checkmated someone on the wrong side of the board being a rook down, there I complicated things and my opponent blundered a piece back, and so on. And this is not even in blitz (it’s in rapid or classical).

AimChess reports

I was not fully sure if it’s really a thing or just my imagination playing tricks on me, but then I looked at AimChess reports for my recent 40 rapid games and compared it with the report that I did 10 months ago. AimChess is a service that analyses your games, grades them and compares to your rating peers in several categories: Openings, Endgames, Tactics, Time Management and so on. There is also a category they call “Resourcefulness”:

Resourcefulness reflects your ability to win or draw games in situations where you find yourself at a disadvantage

To my delight I got this: 35% resourcefulness now vs 9% ten months ago!

You were able to win or draw 35% of the games where your opponent had advantage at some point.

✅ Often you are able to find hidden resources and counterplay to win or draw games despite your worse position.

And the graphs. Now (respectable 35%):

Ten months ago (miserable 6%):

Well, maybe that ten months ago report was more of a fluke (because some even earlier reports show my resourcefulness around 20%), but still, 35% is definitely a big improvement for me and higher than the average. Seemingly I scored especially well in games where I had “-4” or worse (28% drawn or won! - vs 18% average).

Attitude change

OK, enough bragging, let’s get to the point: is there any reason why this happened? Being a human being I, of course, tend to rationalise and explain things (even if they may actually be random) 🙂

I think what has changed my attitude and really inspired me was a Chess Mood article and a course called “The Art of Saving Lost Positions”. The article (highly recommended) has a lot of interesting points about chess and psychology and tons of practical advice. But the most influential was the idea that the game when you are down material is a different type of a game. The main difference is that the strategic considerations take much lower priority now:

• You can’t fight for open lines or outposts — because that would force exchanges, and the less pieces you have the fewer chances to make your opponent make a mistake.

• You can’t normally win pawns — because again, that would likely cause exchanges of the attackers and the defenders of those pawns. And just pawns are usually not enough to turn the tide if you are a rook down.

• You care less about your King’s safety — it doesn’t matter whether you lose by checkmate soon or after 10 lukewarm moves and exchanges, if exposing your King can give you a decent chance to checkmate your opponent’s King earlier.

• You sacrifice more readily and more speculatively, because there is not much risk (the game is more or less lost already, remember? You can’t lose more points than one.)

• You go for your opponent’s King, because that’s an effective way to win the game even when you are tons of material down. No one will count the remaining pieces at the end of the game, as GM Avetik puts it :) Starting pawnstorms from your own king’s castled position may be the new normal now.

I knew most of this before, but this whole idea that after a blunder you can basically reset your mental attitude and play a different kind of game (right within your current game) — and that this game can actually be fun (trying to come up with devilish traps, attacking like a madman, sacrificing pieces fearlessly, what not to like?) — this was a revelation. Thanks to GM Avetik for sharing that!

The article showed me that playing lost games can be interesting: you accept that you are down material, put on your gung-ho hat of a mad sacrificer and dangerous tactician and let the fight begin! In the article they even propose to practise playing “SLP Gambit” (SLP = Saving Lost Positions) in a separate account: 1. e4 e5 2. Ba6?! and then try to draw/win that 😃

The interesting bit is that I even didn’t do the full course (that actually shows you some chess content and examples of saves), I just read the article, did some parts of the course (on days when it was free), but the article itself has already changed my attitude and noticeably helped.

Switching modes over the board

Resetting yourself after a blunder and switching mode is not easy. In OTB tournaments, I do the following:

• Immediately after the blunder leading to a lost position, I try not to show my disappointment too much (that would just reinforce my opponent’s confidence).

• Then I stand up and leave the board for a couple of minutes (usually in classical games you can easily afford that, especially if you are lost anyway): to walk in a hall, calm myself down a little, drink water.

• Then I do something to mark the moment and switch the modes: wash my face with cold water, or do some stretches, or a couple of jumps — to show myself that OK, this is the boundary, before that it was one game, now it’s another game, I am in a different mode now.

• Then I try to be positive — I smile, trying to take it all with some self-irony, and get ready to play tricky moves and to make my opponent work hard to earn the victory. Instead of agonising and looking at my position with disgust — I try to be creative and sly.

Of course, likely all of this won’t help and likely you will still lose the game, but I noticed that losing it like this, after giving a good fight, feels better after the game too. And when you save the game by drawing, or even turn the tide and win, oh, this is a great feeling!

Other things that likely helped

• Playing more blitz. In blitz at my level it’s quite common to be down a piece or a rook but still win, tactics and blunders are abundant, and it’s always harder to attack than to defend. This showed me that miracles are possible and I can carry this notion to rapid and classical.

• Doing tactics. Of course, given that strategic considerations decrease in value when playing lost positions, tactics become even more important. On the other hand, I can see that AimChess score for my tactics actually decreased slightly, so it looks like it doesn’t correlate with Resourcefulness in my case. But anyway, I am solving tactics in blitz mode on ChessTempo regularly, observing gradual progress and considering it an essential part of my chess routine.

My miraculous save from yesterday

To finish it, I’ll share an example of a save that I found very exciting. Of course, the first part of the game, getting into a lost position, is not a reason to be proud. I made a mistake in the opening (Bf5) ruining my Kingside pawn structure, then I missed a knight fork, losing an exchange and finally, when I tried to generate some activity and open lines — I got into a king fork and was about to lose another piece, oh well… Resign? Not yet, I spotted a nice criss-crossing Bishops pattern that looked almost like a checkmate! Why not try and see what happens next? In this 15+10 game I was also quite low on time at the end: I just had under a minute while playing the last 10+ moves (and my opponent had 8-10 minutes). Which makes it hard for me, but also paradoxically easier for the opponent to make mistakes (people normally feel obliged to press on the clock and make quick moves themselves).

A wonderful finish: a checkmate of White King on a8 (!) would follow in two moves.

Outro

I hope you liked the article and I wish you many miraculous saves! Feel free to subscribe to this newsletter to receive future posts directly in your mailbox.

P.S. The link to “Saving Lost Position” article from GM Avetik Grigoryan on ChessMood: https://chessmood.com/blog/slp-method-how-to-save-lost-positions