Learning to Sense Danger at the Amateur Teams

Goeller - Williams, White to play
Should White play 25.Bxb6 or 25.Rxb6?

Goeller - Lima, White to play
Should White play 21.g4 or some other move?

Kopec - Goeller, Black to move
Black wants to play Bxf3 and dxc4, but in what order?

I have annotated three of my more interesting games in a piece titled "Learning to Take My Opponent's Threats Seriously at the 2011 World Amateur Teams."  That sums up the big lesson I needed to learn from my games, and the three diagrams above show the crucial position from each game where I went wrong because I did not think carefully enough about my opponent's threats.  I did see the threats and sensed the danger.  I just did not take those threats seriously.  Fortunately, I was able to get a draw in two of the games.  And I managed a 50% score on Board One for our team, so I'm pretty happy with how things went overall.


I will be posting some more games and stories from the recently concluded World Amateur Team tournament soon.