GM Marian Petrov - Attack the King!

GM Marian Petrov, from Bulgaria, is a new ICC contributor. He's not new at making video courses for people who want to learn and improve the game. His first video course for the Internet Chess club is "Attacking Chess" or "Attack the King!".

In the video lessons, you'll see a lot of different ways to attack the enemy's King: combinations, checkmates, sacrifices, and in general, you'll learn how to attack your opponent's forces in different circumstances. Studying the different patterns that lead to a winning combination means to deeply understand how to think when the opponent's King is castled or not, or when your opponent has a weakness in their pawn structure.

In general, GM Marian divides the attacking paths among three prominent families: 

1. Attacking from the opening: choosing an aggressive opening to allow an attack to happen early in the game;
2. Attacking when the game is balanced and quite complicated. This usually requires in-depth analysis, and it may involve sacrifices to unleash a deadly attack;
3. Attacking when there is a positional battle, but one of the players has a slight advantage.

GM Petrov is not going to show you games where one of the players succeeded in attacking his opponent. Or, better, not only that. He will teach you to recognize - via patterns and board/pieces configurations - when it's the right moment to attack, or when you should wait and develop your pieces differently, regroup, or devise a different plan.

Attacking chess is not charging head-down, trying to destroy everything in your path! It needs planning, thinking, calculation, and ability to analyze the position in all its aspects.

This fantastic course will give you a deeper understanding of tactics and attacking chess, contributing to bringing up the level of your game!

Starting next week, ICC members will be able to solve quizzes and check the annotated games for each video of the course, in the Learning Center. Stay tuned!