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Zwischenzug!
by Natasha Regan and Matt Ball
(New In Chess)
‘Intermediate move’ or ‘in-between move’ doesn’t sound that exciting for a move that is amongst the most devious, devilish and devastating in chess.’
Michael Adams (foreword to Zwischenzug!)
I had already written a review of the excellent Zwischenzug! for this column when I realised that I was playing in the same rapidplay event as Natasha and Matt at the London Chess Classic. It felt like too good an opportunity not to talk further. Following some late-night emails we met up for an interview on the Saturday morning at the Emirates Stadium.
Football grounds always strike me as being much like modern-day cathedrals. They gleam with promise and hope, and truly bring people together. Looking out across a pitch bathed in pink and yellow lights, nurturing the grass prior to Arsenal’s mid-week game against Manchester United, it seemed amazing that chess players had taken over the place. Covid may now be behind us, but I will certainly never forget what it taught me about the power of connectivity, and the joy that comes from chess players being together in person. This was absolutely a top-notch venue for a festival of chess, so many congratulations to all the organisers.
The world championship match between Ding Liren and Gukesh Dommaraju was showing on the big screens inside the Emirates as we spoke. Just twenty-four hours later, both players would praise Natasha’s previous book (co-authored with Matthew Sadler) Game Changer as one of the most influential they had ever read - something that certainly highlights how seriously we should take the work of Natasha and her co-authors, and how much there is to learn and enjoy, whatever standard of player we happen to be.
With a day of tournament chess ahead of us, in amongst the bustle of competitors arriving, clocks being readied, and early morning refreshments being consumed, discussing Zwischenzug! with Natasha and Matt felt like the perfect start to a terrific day. Thanks also to Gul Kapur for taking the photograph!
Ben – Zwischenzug! is a highly innovative idea for a book. I just wondered how you came up with the concept, and decided that this was what you wanted to write?
Matt – Well the shortened version is that I was analysing a game with a friend, and he pointed out that I hadn’t even looked for an intermediate move. This sparked a little thing in my head, and I started teaching intermediate moves at St Albans junior chess club. Speaking to Natasha, we realised this was a topic with a lot more depth to it than we first thought, and our journey of discovery started from there.
Natasha –We started looking at the tactics together. We came to this with no preconceptions. The more we thought about it, the more we saw that we could put a structure around these moves. We tried to work out why they were intermediate moves – what made them forcing – and then reflected on any patterns that we spotted. We didn’t know the patterns in advance, and hadn’t thought through properly what was achieved by the intermediate move prior to our analysis. It was wonderful to come to this subject fresh. We found material from ChessBase searches and master player annotations – particularly where they’d highlighted variations that could have occurred if the game had gone down a different route. It was good to have a mixture of sources, and of course we quickly learnt a lot.
In particular, we looked at Zwischenzugs that happened frequently – a bishop check against the castled king, for example. We saw these happening over and over again, which shows they are either very easy to miss or an underappreciated key theme. The lovely thing about it was that when we started categorising them we found more, including a lot in the World Championship match between Ding Liren and Ian Nepomniachtchi, which ultimately became a whole chapter in the book.
Ben – Talking of world championship matches… One of the other examples you give in the book comes from Carlsen’s World Championship match against Anand in 2014. In game 6 they both miss Zwischenzugs you would expect them to see. Perhaps it shows that these patterns aren’t quite as ingrained in any of us as they could be?
Natasha – We shouldn’t underestimate the pressure of a World Championship match. More generally, when we’re learning we’re taught to put rooks on certain squares or how to pin, but some of Zwischenzug ideas aren’t studied in quite the same way. There are patterns here which can be just as relevant if we know how to find them. It’s like if you had a computer bar telling you that the position was favourable to you, you’d be able to find the move – working through these sorts of patterns helps you to do that.
Matt – Muscle memory is important. In most general tactics books, you’ll have a section on intermediate moves, but they don’t really have the space to cover the topic in full. Zwischenzug! fills a gap as to what these tactics are about end-to-end. It gives you a sense of both material gain, but also positional gain, and we see this a lot of this in the chapter on master games.
Natasha – Of course these things can be double-edged. Someone played a Zwischenzug against me two days ago. He said he had read the book, and I had no idea how much I’d made his day! I told him it showed how good the book was! I’d essentially seen two parts of the tactic, but hadn’t put them together properly. There’s absolutely a real richness in these ideas.
Ben – It strikes me that a lot of players (like me) invest considerable time in studying openings and the like without getting any better. I wondered if you thought that working on things like Zwischenzugs might be a more productive way for a player to train and to improve?
Natasha – I wouldn’t say ‘do this at the expense of everything else’ – but make it one of the things you do. They say having a constraint or focus can make you extra creative. There’s a story I like to tell about a musician who told his students they could only play in a certain key or use certain notes – and, when given this constraint, they produced their most creative work. Some time spent on a particular theme can be very helpful.
Matt – I agree with that. Essentially you build something like studying Zwischenzugs on top of the basic layers of pins, forks and so on into your tactics practice.
Ben – You’ve written this book as a pair (and of course, Natasha, you’ve previously co-authored other books). I wondered how the process works between you?
Natasha – I prefer to write with someone. I like to collaborate, to talk through options. One person has an idea, and the other person builds on it. We talked a lot about each possibility and went through lots of examples together. Having a co-author is definitely a great way of refining your thinking – and hopefully being more than the sum of your parts. It also has to be said that when you are up against deadlines, as we were, it was great to be able to motivate each other!
Matt – I don’t think either of us would have written this book by ourselves. For example, the chapter on positional gains, I wouldn’t have come up with that. Then when the Ding/ Nepo match was full of Zwischenzugs, it was fun to discuss them together and we decided to add an extra chapter to cover it.
Ben - What are you planning to do next?
Natasha - We’ve just published a Chessable course, ‘Masterful moves: Gukesh’, which contains 150 or so Gukesh tactics. These are grouped together for each year as he was growing up, starting when he was about eight. One of the big themes is how he loves to push his pawns, for good or ill - for example, g5 in the World Championship match, as we just witnessed earlier this morning. I suppose he has his own rules as to how to play. When he pushes his pawns his pieces block the gaps, and he ends up with a space advantage. He’s also famous for liking complex positions, calculating well, and outplaying opponents from difficult positions. So, he’s been fascinating to study.
Matt – We’ve presented at the British Championships in Leicester and Hull, and we’ve been travelling around quite a few chess clubs presenting on Zwischenzug! and Gukesh.
Natasha – We’ve been to clubs including Swale, St Albans, Gerrard Cross, Epsom, Watford Juniors,
Charlton, Hammersmith, Richmond, and Brentwood School, and we’re going to Edinburgh in March. We tend to do a presentation and some puzzle solving, along with a book signing. We’ve also been on quite a few podcasts of late to talk about Zwischenzug!, and it has been lovely to share the story of the book with as many people as possible. We’ve also appeared on GM Daniel King’s PowerPlayChess show.
Matt - If anyone would like us to come to their chess club, please do give either Natasha or me a shout!
I was really grateful to Natasha and Matt for their time. I felt that I had learned a lot. Now for the actual review…
Zwischenzug! Review
Perhaps we have all been there. You spend time analysing your position. The sequencing feels clear. You’ll go here, they’ll go there, your follow-up is then clear. You like what you see. You make what you consider to be a forcing move, and sit back in your chair with confidence, wondering what it is that your opponent is now thinking about. Yet then to your horror they don’t play the obvious ‘forced’ move that you had automatically assumed that they would. Instead an intermediate move (or Zwischenzug) appears on the board, and, depending on your luck, your position is now somewhere between lost or positionally much worse than you thought it was going to be.
It is all too easy to curse these moves when they are played against us, and to marvel at their beauty, if we are spectating or happen to unleash them ourselves. Yet I bet most of us have never systematically considered them properly, which is where this terrific book comes in.
Following the wonderful Game Changer, which Natasha Regan co-authored with Matthew Sadler, she now returns in tandem with Matt Ball for the very different but just as innovative Zwischenzug! It is highly unusual to find a book that is wholly dedicated to a major practical chess theme that has not been the subject of other tomes, but this is what Regan and Ball have managed to create – which really speaks to the originality of their work.
The pair seek to group different types of Zwischenzugs into recognisable themes, and to give the reader the tools to spot them and the skills to be able to set them up. From bouncing bishops to mutual en prise and connected queens, a whole new world awaits within these excellent pages. One of the great strengths of this book is how engagingly it is written. There are many well-thought through puzzles for the reader to test themselves against. I must confess that Zwischenzug! took me longer to review than I expected as, rather than just dipping into a handful of these, I was so engrossed that I worked through the lot. From the very first to the very last page the material throughout is utterly captivating.
As the authors highlight, we live in a chess environment that does not lend itself all that easily to finding Zwischenzugs. So perhaps we should not beat ourselves up too much if the fate described in my opening sentences befalls us. Faster time limits and the ability to pre-move online both make it less likely that we will find Zwischenzugs. Yet if this work shows anything, it is that they are much more common than you might think, and hence highly worthy of further study. Indeed, a whole chapter is dedicated to Ding Liren’s 2023 World Championship match against Ian Nepomniachtchi, in which over thirty Zwischenzugs were identified. Regan and Ball note that more than two-thirds of the Zwischenzugs ‘… were unleashed by Ding. He seemed to have decided to use a style in the match that created tension and tactical potential.’
Learning from the champions and developing our own auto-pilot certainly feels like a good plan, while recognising that even the very best miss Zwischenzugs on occasion. Magnus Carlsen allowing, and Anand then overlooking, the relatively simple 28…Nxe5! in game 6 of their match (with Anand going on to lose a contest he had a chance to win) as highlighted in Zwischenzug! made me gasp in amazement, and shows that spotting these tactics cannot be taken for granted. It is much easier to find the patterns when a puzzle position has a sign on it than when they emerge in the cut and thrust of over the board play - hence why honing your skills through practice is so important if looking for these sorts of opportunities (and threats) is to become second nature.
There are four main sections: forcing moves that interrupt the expected sequence, patterns that occur frequently (e.g. where both players have a piece en prise, or where a knight can land on e7 or f6 with check), openings and endgames, and master-level play. There are also insightful reflections on retraining your brain’s autopilot, and the practical aspects of playing a Zwischenzug.
I particularly liked the range of material that Regan and Ball draw on - from modern master games, all the way back to Francisco De Castellvi’s 1475 game against Narcí Vinyoles. In an effort that became the subject of a Catalan poem called Scachs d’Amor (which the authors’ note translates as The Chess Game of Love), this is also an excellent illustration of an important theme in Zwischenzug! – ‘Queen en prise? No panic.’ Philidor’s 1788 battle against Hans Moritz von Brühl also more than stands the test of time, and illustrates the long thread of chess Zwischenzugs stretching back through history.
As the authors note, ‘Like any tactic – or indeed any part of chess – the more we study it, the better we will understand it.’ Zwischenzug! is the perfect way to do this, as well as providing an opportunity to marvel once again at chess’s hidden depths and the beauty of some of its patterns. The book is badged as being suitable for intermediate club players through to those over 2200 strength, which feels about right. There is much here to enjoy, and this is an excellent and highly original offering.
So perhaps the best intermediate move you can make this Christmas is to grab yourself a copy and one for a friend. Undoubtedly this is a book that will improve your pattern recognition and sharpen up your tactical play. Who knows, if Carlsen and Anand don’t read it, and you find yourself up against them in the future, you might even get a chance to put your learning into practice against a celebrated opponent! Even if such an opportunity does not arise, as Michael Adams noted, intermediate moves truly are ‘devious, devilish and dangerous.’ With Natasha and Matt as our guides, we can undoubtedly add these more consciously to our tool kit.