In this DVD, the 78th volume of the Empire Chess series, Grandmaster Damian Lemos presents a series of Super GM games that focus on attacking, and more importantly, counterattacking. He does this by extensively discussing strong Grandmaster games. If you want to dominate attacking and counterattacking techniques, you should watch these videos.
While attacking is a very important part of chess, you have to know how to attack well and when to correctly evaluate a position, as well as learning how to use the counterattack, a very powerful weapon that we must have in our repertoire since we often have to learn to defend ourselves and wait for our opportunity to counterattack. It tends to be very effective since our opponent moves from attacking to defending, which they often do not like; the counterattack is often more effective due to the opponent’s poor defense which is incapable of adapting to the new situation.
In this preview video, you will see a game between two incredibly strong GMs in Geller and former world champion Spassky, in the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense. Here we see the typical game with opposing castling, White castles on the queenside and Black will do so on the kingside.
Black gained space on the queenside, White played on the kingside; Black took the initiative on the c-file and pressuring on e4. Both flanks focus on attacking the opponent’s king with their pawns, Spassky played finely with e5 and Ne6, from e6 the knight defends the kingside and targets the squares f4 and d4.There were various examples of counterattacking in this game such as after g6 from White when Black played b3!, without losing tempo; initiative is important and creating threats on the opponent’s king is essential in this position. As a general rule in these attacks on opposing flanks, whoever takes the initiative to first create the most dangerous threats tends to win.Black retained a strong pawn on a2 and the white king on a1 was in more danger than the black king on f8. You will see a very intense and hard-fought game with exchanging blows from both sides.