Checkmate with 4 queens - from Alekhine to Kasparov

Reading Kasparov’s books is quite entertaining, and some parallels between various historic chess battles can be observed.
Kasparov – Karpov, 1986 match, game 22
After 43.Rb4!
Black’s king is vulnerable against the attack on the c1-h6 diagonal, and although I was familiar with this idea/position before, only now I noticed that the main line of the combination contained a pretty mate:
43. Rb4 Rxb4 (Karpov actually played 43… Rc4) 44. axb4 d4 45. b5 d3 46. b6 d2 47. b7 d1=Q 48. b8=Q

Both sides have a new queen, but White’s threats are more dangerous, Qf4 is a threat.
48… Qc1 49. Nxg6 Qxg6 50. Qh8+ Qh7 51. Qgxg7#

Checkmate! Does that look familiar?

Well, now all sorts of bells start ringing, and indeed, I found a similar mate in another book by Kasparov:
Capablanca – Alekhine, 1927, Game 11
Checkmate after 67. Qh1#

Sometimes it’s worth digging a bit deeper into trees of variations in Kasparov’s books as now I understand why every time he mentions game 22 of the 1986 match, he calls it a “study like win”. It is also not surprising that Kasparov thinks that Alekhine is the World Champion with chess style most similar to his own.

A tactic that Karpov and Kasparov both missed

Karpov – Georgadze, 1983

  Black to move. Where should the rook retreat?
In this position Black played 24… Rcc8 and experienced difficulties after White transferred the knight to c6. He later lost the game.
In his book “My 100 wins” (1984) Anatoly Karpov instead recommended 24… Rc7 (presumably to make sure that Be7 is guarded when White knight arrives to c6) 25. Nb4 Qf5 – “starting the counter attack as soon as possible”. There is a little tactical problem with that suggestion, that Karpov probably overlooked. It is ironic that Kasparov later copied the entire annotation in his Volume 5 of “My Great Predecessors”, without spotting the mistake (and I am pretty sure it is a mistake, since White gets to win a pawn or exchange on a spot without obvious compensation). That just goes to show that even world champions should blunder check their recommendations with engines (although of course there were no engines when Karpov’s book was first published).

Here is the position after Karpov’s suggested improvement of “Rc5-c7”.

White to move. How to win material immediately?

Kasparov on my Great Predecessors - book review

This book review was written around the year 2003, when I went through Kasparov's newly published books for the first time.

The books have been widely discussed in chess forums for the last year or so, with lots of excitement, but also lots of criticism. I think the major problem with this book is that they screwed up the translation of the English title which should have been Kasparov on His Great Predecessors. Otherwise I think that all the criticism that has been directed towards the volumes I and II has been mostly coming from people who are trying to prove that this Kasparov’s work is not perfect.

While it is not perfect indeed, I think my major expectations from the book were:

- Read about the great players of the past and see their best games – achieved! I had seen some Rubinstein games before, but was interesting to see an overview of his career. I think subchapters on grandmasters who were not world champions make a really nice bonus.

- See Kasparov’s insight into the moves and evaluations of positions. Basically I wanted to see how Kasparov perceives the game position, how he approaches analysis, opening preparation, combinations. – achieved, although I wish there was more of, not because there was not enough, but simply because this is the most exciting part of the project.

- See some old analysis refuted (not sure how this is useful for me personally, or an average reader-joe, but still, this refutations are interesting) – achieved!

All games given in the book are interesting to look at, not only because they were played by great players, but because Kasparov thinks they reflect the stage at which chess was at the time. Kasparov selects games that introduced new positional plans in the middlegame, or that give insight into psychology of the players. I am sure that many games given by Kasparov are familiar to a serious student of the game. And yet from the instructive point of view, this is even better: I think going over each game analysed by Kasparov teaches more if the student has seen the game before: this reinforces knowledge of classical games, and adds a bit of finer understanding of context of the game, and the analysis behind it as well. Overall I think by working on this project Kasparov gives tribute to the so-called analytical approach to chess (initially advocated by Botvinnik). I don’t think any of the top players would spend lots of time preparing deep analysis of Lasker – Schlechter, 1910, game 10, for the whole world to scrutinize. Shirov, Anand, Kramnik prefer to publish collection of their own games, which really involves a lot less work, since they usually need to reflect merely on what they saw during the game, in post-mortem, or in preparation for the game. Exciting as that is, this is not analysis for the sake of analysis. By devoting several pages to some ancient game, I think, Kasparov is sending the message that deep analysis of games is what all chess players looking for improvement need to spend time on. The second volume (at least the Russian addition that I own) has an appendix which reviews analytical discoveries made about the games from the first volume since it was published. Few authors are so willing to go back to their old analysis and update it!