Todd asked me to post this a while back, and I have simply been too slow about it!
Recently I have been studying the games of former World Champion Tigran Petrosian, and even though I was already familiar with his style, I am still amazed at his method.
There are many amazing parts to his style, but what stands out to me is his completely holistic approach to the evaluation of positions, and in particular his highly conditional and contextual valuation of individual pieces.
When asked "Which World Champion sacrificed the most?", many players would reply "Tal, of course", but they would be incorrect. Petrosian is the "all-time sac leader", fueled mainly by his predilection for sacrificing a rook for a minor piece.
As I play through his games, his method shows a pattern, which I have come to regard as his "formula" for winning games.
The formula is based on the premise of a closed position, where there are many pawns on the board, and the pawns still possess mobile potential. This mobile potential could be in the form of existing pawn breaks, or it could be latent, in that a sacrifice or other dynamic change of the position is needed to release the mobile potential of the pawns.
In such positions, minor pieces are often more mobile and valuable than rooks. Petrosian's approach was to trade his "relatively less valuable" rooks for "relatively more valuable" minor pieces (often changing the pawn structure as well, in his favor), and then use his remaining pieces to support his central pawn roller to conquer the center and win the game.
I have two games that serve as great examples.
In the first game, we see a young Petrosian sacrifice a rook passively (offering it to be captured as a choice for the other player), in a position that he considered already won:
Dunaev-Petrosian USSR Under 18 Championship 1946
In the second game, played some 24 years later, we see a much more mature, post-World Champion Petrosian demonstrate the same formula against the world class GM Vastimil Hort:
Hort-Petrosian World Team Championship 1970
These are just two examples of Petrosian's technique, and I highly recommend the study of his games for more gems such as these!
That was worth the wait! Well done.
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