Anatomy of a Successful Attack

I have been thinking about this article for a long while and I actually haven't done much chess study recently so I am quite rusty now. But I would like to still share some of my ideas on attacking chess or the tactical side of the game.

Obviously, whether you are a very energetic, dynamic player or a more reserved and pragmatic, building up an attack is always going to be the climax of your game. Since you need to take the enemy king captive, whether it is a direct or indirect attack, you still are attacking your opponent's base.

I have seen how strategic and tactical players orchestrate their attacks on their opponents. Masters like Tal or Morphy have more flair and spectacle to their attacks while Karpov and other positional chess players are more subtle with their attacks, opting first to grind their opponents and accumulate their small advantages until they unleash the full potential of their pieces.

There are three things that I think would be essential for an attack: piece coordination, timing, and a plan (by plan, I mean goals or targets that you are aiming to do). Having the first two components would actually lead to combinations and mating nets. It would be very useful if there are certain patterns that you can detect on the board so that you can take advantage of them.

1. Piece coordination
By piece coordination, it's basically having teamwork among your pieces because you cannot checkmate the enemy king with only one piece, you need at least three pieces working together to bring down that monarch! In alignment with this, there is also a need to know where the right squares are for your pieces especially in concerting an attack. As much as possible, our pieces need to be close to the enemy king. But be careful of losing momentum which is the reason for the next component.

2. Timing
You need to have enough time to prepare for the attack because you're going to run out of fuel if you just keep charging forward. Sometimes our opponents can actually launch a counterattack against us which is going to hurt since you exerted a big amount of effort to checkmate your opponent but since he got to you first, all that effort would be for naught. This leads us to the last component.

3. Plan
Even though attacking is usually associated with tactics and spectacular sacrifices, it is the silent and subtle sacrifices that deal the most damage. Even Tal would sometimes think a while before launching an attack. But he's a human calculator with chess combinations so he's on a whole different level of concentration. For us, however, trying to squirm our way through a hopelessly lost position by using tactics will just end in disaster which is why we also need to have a little bit of positional precision. There needs to be a good balance between tactics and strategy (the strategy being our main focus on where we're headed).

So these are just some of my thoughts on how to launch a successful attack. Some tips: often, targeting the weakest squares (usually the pawns around the king) would make our lives easier on which area of the board to focus our attack on. Recently, my games playing as black using the Najdorf Sicilian are great examples on how my king can easily get demolished when White would just roll his kingside pawns over the board.

Hope you have some great chess!