Chessable Course Review: Identifying Critical Moments in Chess by NM Ben Johnson
An excellent offering for club players from Chessable
Thank you Ben Johnson for gifting me this Chessable course.
Introduction
If you are an avid and social media-keen chess improver living in the 2020s, Ben Johnson is a household name and needs no introduction. Supposing you don't know who he is, my introduction in the review for his book "Perpetual Chess Improvement" should rapidly acquaint you.
Since the recent release of his first Chessable course, Identifying Critical Moments in Chess, Ben is no longer just a book author but also a course creator in the rapidly growing market of online chess instruction. So, what makes his course stand out from the others?
Like some recent releases on the Chessable platform (I'm thinking of fellow #chesspunks Kamryn Hellman’s (The Little Pawn) 50 Essential Chess Concepts and Solveig Friberg's Breaking 1000), Identifying Critical Moments in Chess is aimed more towards club players. In this case, I think the course is going to be most useful for players between 1000 and 1600 USCF. This is not to say that Class B players like myself can't also benefit from Ben's work -- but that the concepts contained therein aren't groundbreaking as much as they are the basic building blocks of becoming a stronger club-level player. If you’re Class B or below, this is certainly worth looking at.
What is a critical moment in chess anyway?
ICMC's aim is to teach the student
what a critical moment is (and is not)
how to identify them
what to do once you've found yourself in one.
Critical moments in chess refers to positions where a player has an opportunity to either (attempt to) capitalize on an important feature in the position (such as gaining a good square for a piece, or a tactic that wins material) or must make a very careful choice to maintain an advantage, minimize a disadvantage, or otherwise defend their position.
One major problem with critical moments, however, is that you cannot see what you cannot see. You don't know unless you know. This leads to all sorts of losses players can experience due to moves that come seemingly by surprise.
Consider this recent loss of mine in a tournament game:
After 23.Nf2 Qxg3, White would be worse, materially down four pawns for a knight; but play could continue and White could try to complicate, given the heavy material imbalance. All would not be entirely lost. Instead, I played 23.Qf2?? and after 23…Rxd3! I resigned on the spot. 0-1
A quick diagnosis reveals that I hadn’t taken this moment seriously enough — if I understood how critical the moment actually was (e.g. recognizing the threat of Rxd3, not just worrying about dropping the g3-pawn), I may have been able to prolong my suffering and even eked out a half-point save.
One other harrowing problem with critical moments is when you see a tactic that fails for some deeper reason that cannot be teased out from the surface — you have to dig deeper into it. And inversely, there is the issue of misidentifying a critical moment. Not all positions are equally important, and it's of great practical benefit to know when you're in a relatively inconsequential moment, so that you minimize the time spent there and have more time on the clock when you really need to calculate out an important sequence to see if it is the best choice for you over the board. After a brief description and some examples of critical moments in the introduction, the first chapter deals with the above issue of non-critical moments.
From there, everything is critical, and I think Ben did an excellent job outlining the kind of issues he sees at the club level. Using a mixture of his own games, online game databases, and even master-level play, Ben broke down his findings into the following five categories:
Counterattacks
Chances to grab material
Strong threats
Back rank vulnerabilities
Simplified endgames
These five concepts are dealt with across six chapters under the following headings:
Materialism in chess refers to the proclivity of players to become overly attached to any extra pawns or pieces they may have gained over the course of the game; it can also refer to an unwillingness to sacrifice material when it could be the best choice in a given position. Anybody who studies the classics knows how pawn- or even piece-grubbing can lead one into hot water, yet this issue can show up in more subtle ways, such as in positions where one must "give back" their material gains to keep a positional advantage, or in positions where gaining material leads to positional minuses allowing an unexpected perpetual check or worse, checkmate.
Fancy Play Syndrome generally refers to dubious zwischenzugs — cheap threats that appear dangerous at first but can be refuted with careful calculation.
Defense is an unequivocally important skill to grow in as one becomes a better player — and therefore, focusing on it will result in saving half-points -- and sometimes possibly stealing whole points as well.
Don't Get Mated is somewhat along these lines as well, since it requires a defensive mindset in the moment, but it's also important to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Back Rank Chicanery sounds exactly like it is. Players learn early on not to allow an enemy rook on their back ranks, but that doesn't stop threats from being created indirectly and exposing this as a tactical problem by an unpleasant surprise.
And lastly, and pretty importantly: Endgame swings. How often does an amateur (or even a professional player) trade down into an endgame only to find that they’ve lost all their advantage and perhaps even acquired a losing disadvantage? Moments like these can be inscrutably critical and it’s paramount to know whether the endgame one is considering is actually the path forward.
Putting your skills to the test
After taking you through many examples of real-life tragicomic games, Ben gives you a chance to practice your new critical-moment-identifying chops with a chapter that contains five full games with which to practice identifying each moment move-by-move. Once this is done, Ben shares his annotations so you can compare. The translation of this concept to MoveTrainer leaves a bit to be desired, and maybe should prompt Chessable to consider adding an editable analysis board with which a user can input their notes on any given variation, which would make chapters like this even better in the future. This isn’t a fault of the course but the current limitations of the Chessable platform. The main point I’m making here is that Ben shines best here as a chess teacher: You have to let your students try for themselves. Please, if you’re studying this course, don’t skip this chapter!
After that section, the course then gives you “the big one”, a 50-position test chapter with virtually no hints, allowing you to really put any newly acquired skills to the test. This chapter is challenging, rewarding, and, importantly, didactically useful and full of detailed solutions and explanations. Ben’s clear mission is that the student doesn’t feel lost in the details but finds their way to the answer in a way that they can apply to their own thought process.
Practical advice that club players can actually learn from and use
This brings up another one of the course’s main strengths: In virtually every puzzle or example, Ben adopts something close to a “move-by-move” approach with each given position, and includes many explanations of plausible-yet-wrong moves that a student in the skill range of the target audience may suggest, as well as valid alternatives, including some that could he considered a bit too “computery”. Ben makes these kinds of judgements throughout the course and I think the course is better off for it. I found reading these annotations all helpful and instructive.
While ICMC isn’t the end-all-be-all of courses, it does incidentally help to fill a niche that is often lacking in course materials at this level: defensive play. And since the point of the course is to learn how to identify critical moments, the student is encouraged to think for themselves as to whether the position in question calls for an attack or for a clever move that eliminates enemy counterplay, or the singular move that defends against a crushing attack by an opponent’s desperado, etc. It is refreshingly open-ended in certain ways that I think holds a lot of practical teaching value especially in the day and age of computer-influenced chess thinking where only the top engine line is often (erroneously) considered worth playing.
Overall, I feel like ICMC’s greatest strength is the way it reframes calculation and tactics puzzles. It’s one thing to be given instructions on how to find tactics, and this is an important feature of any player’s skillset; but it’s another to think of the psychology of finding when you’re experiencing a critical moment in chess. As someone who has certainly made missteps in tournament games himself, the advice he gives comes from painful experience (as it is with any club player’s career) — but he’s put it on display for everyone to learn from and that’s what another part of what makes ICMC so endearing.
Final thoughts and conclusion
Lastly, I don’t typically go for video courses, but that’s what Ben sent me. After going through a few chapters, I can imagine some real benefit for players who prefer to watch video when they learn, especially given the subject material. This course contains nearly 13 hours of video content to go along with it, and given the relatively small number of informational variations and puzzles, the quality of instruction is rather high. Ben sticks pretty closely to the annotations themselves — and that’s the best part of the course. This really comes down to preference and your disposable income, but I would consider giving the video course a try, even if you don’t typically spring for them.
As far as critiques go, it’s hard to think of much that could improve on this course that isn’t related to MoveTrainer’s limitations, so long as the target audience and subject material is in view. Perhaps things would be even better if it was made into a book. But I think this is a great course for students and for coaches who need material for their students or who are looking for different ways to frame the importance of calculation and visualization and honing one’s instincts as to when the time has actually come for those things. This is a course that is unapologetically for club players from the 1000s up to the 1600s. I think the skill ceiling for this course probably tops out at Class B (up to 1800), but that it will be most valuable for players from Class D to Class C (1200-1600). Players below the 1200-range are likely to feel very challenged — but maybe that’s exactly what they need in order to improve!
4.5/5
You can purchase Identifying Critical Moments in Chess here on Chessable.
I really appreciate this thoughtful review, Nick.