Dark Forest Vol. 3 The Courageous Queen by GM Maurice Ashley 27 Sep 2024

This series is designed to free your mind from the stiff thinking of “knight equals 3 points, pawn equals 1”. Those rules do not apply in a Dark Forest, least of all when you are about to give up a queen, or, as in some variations, two queens.

As the title suggests, this volume is about your most powerful asset on the chessboard. You will see that mastering the strongest piece can produce the strongest impact: on your rating, your friends, and on the face of your opponent when they overlook a decisive queen blow.

Enjoy the royal aesthetics

Many positions of this course are a delight just to look at. There’s something fascinating about those sacrifices, attacks, and insane full-board geometry that players of all levels can appreciate. They are so beautiful, in fact, that they should be included in an art exhibition.

And who could be a better tour guide than GM Maurice Ashley! With his experience and charisma, GM Ashley is the best when it comes to seeing art in chess, and he takes it one step further, coming up with a whole story surrounding each position, its origin, development, culmination, and even the opponents’ possible thought process along the way. His vivid storytelling makes it easy to remember the chess ideas.

It also makes watching the course video a recreational activity all in itself. It beats watching a Hollywood movie, with plot twists far less predictable, like in the position below:

We are sending this to the Louvre

Enrich your tactics

The Queen is a very tactical piece. It is innerly coordinated, as you will learn from the course, which allows it to use the tactical motifs faster and to a greater extent than the other pieces. For that reason chapters 1 to 4 mostly talk about tactics, with a lot of queen sacrifice ideas to remember.

There is a good balance of complex tactical positions and simpler patterns that are easy to learn and transfer to your games. Patterns like this:

1. Qh6! 1-0

In what looks like a typical equal setup, a courageous queen move ends the game right there and then. Seeing opportunities like this will greatly broaden your tactical vocabulary; and you will inevitably start seeing them after studying all 158 variations of the course.

Deepen your understanding

It is not all about tactics though. The author offers insights on many interesting chess questions:

✔️ What threats to look for in a queen vs. queen endgame
✔️ What makes a move unexpected (even invisible) to the opponent
✔️ When to trade rooks
✔️ What you should ask yourself on every move to find stunning aggressive lines
✔️ What the important factors are in evaluating queen vs. 3 minor pieces
✔️ When the king could be safer in the middle of the board

Play the move of your life!

This course will improve all aspects of your chess just as well as studying the first and the second volumes will. However, there is an additional benefit: it puts you in a position to create a chess masterpiece of your own. A game won by a beautiful queen sacrifice is a memory that stays with you (and your opponent) for a long time.

So as the author has put it: “Don’t miss it when your chance for immortality comes.”