Aphelion raises very valid and interesting points.
To his question, 1. "Am I making the same mistake again?", and to his other question, 2. "Was my last move made out of fear or rational reasoning?"
Answer to 1:
Yes and no.
Answer to 2:
Both.
Let me clarify both answers, and for this I'm going to have to go back to my chess references.
One of my favorite chess books is, "How to Become a Deadly Chess Tactician" by David LeMoir. In this book, he goes through and looks at some of the priceless, beautiful games of chess that contain at least one sacrifice. He starts by going back to 1851, the year that chess legend Adolf Anderssen played the 'Immortal Game'. He then looks at the motivation of various great players to see why they sacrificed material.
I hope it's ok posting this because it illustrates my point beautifully. He gets to Tal, and here's what he said, "In the middle of the 1950s, along came Mikhail Tal, a man who needs no introduction. He was something of a throwback to the bygone days, the New Romantic of the chessboard.
Tal's love of sacrificing was so strong that he felt compelled to make a habit of it. I once decided to count how often he sacrificed, so I took Thomas's book the Complete Games of Mikhail Tal 1960-66 and counted up the games and sacrifices that he played from the first event after he won the World Championship in 1960 to Reyjavik 1964, the tournament before the Amsterdam Interzonal. I discounted the 1962 Candidates tournament at Curacao on the grounds that Tal was very ill at the time.
The results? The book gives 231 competitive games, of which 96 feature at least one Tal sacrifice. That's over 40%. Many of the sacrifices were in combinations that finished off games, but plenty were played to grab the initiative or open up attacks. Some were unsound, fewer failed. We must ask the question: why could Tal find the excuse to play sacrifices in nearly half his games when few other players, let alone grandmasters playing in the top flight, could manage it in a small fraction of their games? It was said by Reuben Fine that Alekhine "... would almost literally shake combinations out of his sleeve", but even in his young days his efforts could not compare to Tal's prolific output of sacrifices.
The comparison with Alekhine is worth taking further. As Alekhine progressed, he refined his positional play in order to cope with the leading players of his day. He still played sacrifices, but more and more they formed the keystones of combinations that merely completed the work that his fine positional play had started. The first objective was to create a winning position; sacrifices could finish the job.
By contrast, throughout his life Tal would play sacrifices in
ANY phase of the game.
Sometimes they were played simply because he wanted an interesting game....
Tal's success as a sacrificer resulted from both his personality and his mental faculties.
He loved a fight. He had great intuition, a rich imagination and a love of beauty. He was able to calculate at great speed and visualize future positions with remarkable clarity. He had an uncanny judgement of the effects of strange material imbalances. He had a great sense of humor, one effect of which was to help him see paradoxical ideas."
(Emphasis mine.)
This illustrates my point beautifully that I kind of pointed to in my last post.
Aphelion wrote:
Before playing a move like this, you absolutely need to read ahead - because usually when playing like this your opponent can get away with an okay result even when not playing too optimally, but one mistake from you and you are done.
Here is where I disagree slightly. First of all, I strongly agree that reading ahead is mandatory in situations like this. I read a couple of variations, saw that it was going to complicated, for example, I knew my opponent was going to jump one space to F5, but I didn't go into a lot of depth. Why? Because I felt the position was too complicated for me to read anything out
accurately and completely. Now I know that I'm going to take heat for that comment. So let me elaborate.
Here's a story about Tal that illustrates my point, again, beautifully: (from Wikipedia)
Journalist: - "It might be inconvenient to interrupt our profound discussion and change the subject slightly, but I would like to know whether extraneous, abstract thoughts ever enter your head while playing a game?"
Tal: - "Yes. For example, I will never forget my game with GM Vasiukov on a USSR Championship. We reached a very complicated position where I was intending to sacrifice a knight. The sacrifice was not obvious; there was a large number of possible variations; but when I began to study hard and work through them, I found to my horror that nothing would come of it. Ideas piled up one after another. I would transport a subtle reply by my opponent, which worked in one case, to another situation where it would naturally prove to be quite useless. As a result my head became filled with a completely chaotic pile of all sorts of moves, and the infamous "tree of variations", from which the chess trainers recommend that you cut off the small branches, in this case spread with unbelievable rapidity.
And then suddenly, for some reason, I remembered the classic couplet by Korney Ivanovic Chukovsky: "Oh, what a difficult job it was. To drag out of the marsh the hippopotamus".
I do not know from what associations the hippopotamus got into the chess board, but although the spectators were convinced that I was continuing to study the position, I, despite my humanitarian education, was trying at this time to work out: just how WOULD you drag a hippopotamus out of the marsh? I remember how jacks figured in my thoughts, as well as levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder.
After a lengthy consideration I admitted defeat as an engineer, and thought spitefully to myself: "Well, just let it drown!" And suddenly the hippopotamus disappeared. Went right off the chessboard just as he had come on ... of his own accord! And straightaway the position did not appear to be so complicated. Now I somehow realized that it was not possible to calculate all the variations, and that the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. And since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it."
Journalist: - "And the following day, it was with pleasure that I read in the paper how Mikhail Tal, after carefully thinking over the position for 40 minutes, made an accurately-calculated piece sacrifice".
This points out that intuition is just as vital as calculation, and it would be foolish to completely ignore intuition. I suspect that Aphelion knows this and trusts his calculation AND intuition, but calculation his backs up his intuition.
Aphelion wrote:
Furthermore, positional advantages aren't erased by aggressive fighting and or "blowing the board up" - often they manifest themselves most strongly in these scenarios.
I believe that this is one of those half-truths, that if you grab the wrong half you're in a world of hurt.
Positional advantages are some of the most permanent advantages in chess and go. That I won't dispute. However, you still have to know how to exploit the advantages in order to profit from them. Does SinK know how to use certain advantages? Probably not, but that is not the issue here. In fact, I'm going to assume he does in order not to make mistakes. If I "blow-up" the board and make the game sufficiently complicated then one mistake by EITHER of us might end the game.
Tal made the game complicated at EVERY opportunity, and he was playing his strengths. If he could do what he did with chess what says I can't do it with go.
Basically, Tal feared no one, so he'd sacrifice against anyone. I'm not going to be afraid of SinK just to because I screwed up. Also, I want an interesting game thus my move.