Letzelter – Faivre, 1971
White’s last move must have been Bg5, with a discovered attack against the unprotected rook on d4.
Just like the annotator and players, I fell for 1… Qxg5 2. Rxd4 Ne3!, which does give black some advantage after 3. Qc6 Nxf1 4. Kxf1 Qe3! 5. Qf3! However a computer engine pointed out a much simpler and more effective solution. What was it?
The World Championship match is very intense and there are a lot of sources covering it. I am enjoying video reviews from Sergei Shipov (in Russian) at http://www.crestbook.com/; he has been joined by Garry Kasparov during analysis for the last couple of games.
Not all websites, however, provide equally deep coverage; the main page of The Week in Chess as of this morning sounded somewhat superficial when describing game 8:
Anand got a completely drawn position and then played 54...Bc6??? which lost almost instantly and he resigned a couple of moves later. In contrast to game 7 both players played poorly. Anand's opening was bad, Topalov didn't press very well and certainly didn't cause Anand's shocking blunder at the end. All very odd.
Is it possible to get cause and effect in chess any more wrong than that? Has any world championship match been more intense than this one? There are no short draws, Topalov is playing in every game till there are kings on the board, and is pressing against Anand with his opening preparation as well. It is pretty clear that exhaustion is mounting and this why Anand made the blunder that he made in game 8. There are still 4 exciting games left in this match, so we’ll have to see what happens next, while today is rest day.
Kortchnoi – Dreev, 1992
Having invested one piece into opening up Black’s king, Viktor Kortchnoi should have thrown in another one!
19. Bb4 would have won the game, since after 19… Bxb4 20. Re3, the rook threatens to swing both to g3 and to h3.
Instead Viktor the great must have overlooked the idea completely and settled for perpetual check! Click here for the complete game.
A couple of weeks ago I participated in the BC Active Championship, which was won by Vicente Lee, second year in a row. I lost to speed chess maestros Vicente Lee and Mayo Fuentebella, but going into the last round still had a chance for the 4th place prize. After a complicated opening, my opponent cracked in mutual time pressure:
Jiganchine – Villavieja, Vancouver 2010, Round 9
Loose pieces drop off, and the pawn cost Black a 100 dollars (4th prize) as his rooks became unprotected: 27 …. Qxh6?? 28. Re8+ Rxe8 29. Qxe8+ Kg7 30. Qe5+
Before that, I was lucky in round 5 in a similar way:
Bellanger – Jiganchine, Vancouver 2010, Round 5
Can White take on h4?
That cost him the game as the treacherous knights found their victim: 2. Rxh4?? Rxh4 3.Rxh4 Nef5+! and Black won.
And in the first round I came up with a big blunder of my own, but opponent did not take advantage of it:
Caluza – Jiganchine, Vancouver 2010, Round 1
For a bizarre reason I decided to chase away the bishop with 14…h6?
The simplest now was 15. Bxh6! the point being that 15… gxh6?! 16 Qg4 + leaves White with an extra pawn.
Black has more resilient defence, but still would remain worse, and I had totally overlooked my hanging knight on d7 when playing h6. Another example to illustrate John Nunn's LPDO principle: Loose pieces drop off (explained in Nunn's "Secrets of Practical Chess"). In the game my opponent instead played 15. Qg4? and lost the game after some adventures. Speed chess is an odd hybrid where you have a bit of time to think about planning and strategy, but often end up winning and losing because of one move threats.
Here is an older video I actually recorded a while ago (but only now had time to go to and do some minimal editing). I go through my blitz games and look at different ways Black can go wrong while trying to complete his development.
Moral of the story:
Memorize an opening variation – you may be lucky to win a single game.
Understand typical tactical ideas in a common pawn structure – you will win multiple games while your opponents play what they think “common sense moves”.
PS. Yes, unfortunately the audio is not very loud, my video editing skills are still non-existent.
Have a look at this position, which arises in Panov Attack in the Caro-Kann, or from some lines of Queen’s Gambit Declined.
1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. exd5 cxd5 4. c4 Nf6 5. Nc3 e6 6. Nf3 Be7 7. cxd5 Nxd5 8.
Bd3 Nc6 9. O-O O-O 10. Re1 and now Black can play Qa5, which is a very rare sideline
Say, the database will tell you that 4 games have been played with this move, and black scored 50% with Qa5. The move itself sure does not look quite right, but Viktor Korchnoi himself played it, and the score seems not too bad. The 50% however is completely deceptive, have a look at another position from Brodsky – Maiorov, one of the games played in this line.
White (a Grandmaster) is completely winning, but he played the completely inexplicable 47. Rd2?? dropping the rook on c4, and resigned a couple of moves later. So that 50% should have really been 75% in White’s favour! 4 games is really too small of a pool to rely on the numbers, so you should really look at objective value of Qa5 instead of relying on rather meaningless percentage from a database. I had failed to do that, so Black’s other loss is mine – from my 2002 game against Stephen Glinert! The title of the post is of course not fully true – sometimes you should check how well each side is scoring in a line before playing it, but it’s more important to understand the meaning of moves while building up your opening repertoire, especially if you rely on sidelines like Qa5.
Ershov-Jiganchine, 1996, White to move
What does this position have to do with the subject? Please bear with me for a minute. Today I was going through my REALLY old chess games, the ones that I never entered into a computer (because I did not have one at the time), curious to see the quality of my games when I was 13-14 years old. I had the “first rank” in Russian classification which is supposed to equal 1900 ELO. Next is KMS, which corresponds to being an expert. I must say the types of mistakes I was making are the kind of slips I expect a 1900 player to make. This position is a good example of the kinds of things that my opponents and myself would miss. In the game White played 37. Rd8? and the game was quickly drawn. A simple 37. Rb7! instead leads to a huge advantage. Doubling rooks on the 7th rank in 4-rook endgames is deadly! If you go through a game with the engine running in the background, the monster would scream at you 37. Rb7 +-. (e.g. 37. Rb7 Kh8 38. Rdd7 Rg8 39. a5 +-) Without a computer - to find an obvious move like this in post-mortem, without knowing that this is a typical idea, you’d have to either show the whole game to a chess coach, or spend hours yourself analysing every move. As a result – I missed the chance to learn from a very instructive exchange of mistakes. Today – I can spot a mistake like this fairly easily (any exchange of pieces is potentially a critical moment in a game), but at the time – I never did look back to move 37 of that game.
Another thing that struck me – theory in our games ended at around move 5, and we`d be playing on our own (kind of a good thing). I had few opening books at the time, and if my opponent played a move that was not mentioned anywhere, even after the game I had no clue whether “the novelty” was good or bad.
To summarize - computers have changed the rules of the game (and how you study it) in roughly the following ways, making it both easier and harder to study chess
Gerhard Neufahrt - Sergei Sokourinski
BC Closed/Vancouver (9.2) 2001
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