My next move will come on Monday, so cast your votes early (especially to win tiebreaks)!
I had a decent Iowa Open, scoring 3.0/5.0, though in the last round I messed up a pretty easy draw. I had a couple games which were interesting, and what is more than that, I had some pretty cool tactics come up. I will post some of these tactical puzzles and the solutions below. If you want to see the whole games (the one against Kende is worth seeing, a really complex middlegame) then just ask and I will put them up too.
Tactic #1: vs Bullinga (Black to move), difficulty: 2/10 for the tactic, 6/10 for the underlying idea:
Tactic #2: vs J. Zhang (White to move), difficulty: 4/10:
Tactic #3: also vs J. Zhang (mostly here because it is cute, not because it is hard) (also white to move), difficulty: :-)/10 :
Tactic #4: vs Kende (White to move), difficulty: 7/10:
Solutions:
#1: 1. ...Bh3+! seals white's fate 2. Kxh3 Qxf3 keeps the white king permanently on the side of the board where it is vulnerable. Seeing just this far is fine, but here is the real threat: 3. Be3?! (white is lost anyway) Re5! (mate is threatened via Rh5#) and the game concluded: 4. Qa4 Rh5+ 5. Qh4 Rxh4+ 6. Kxh4 Re8! (same idea) 7. Rad1 Re5 (there are a lot of mates here, so just playing one that you can see is more important than finding the shortest one) 8. g4 g6! 9. Rfe1 Rh5+!! (mate in 2 by gxh5 Qxh5#) resigns.
#2: White is better and will probably be able to win this ending anyway, but... 1. Rxf6!! gxf6 2. Rg1+ Kh8 3. Bd4! (threatens Bxf6#!) Rfe8+ 4. Kf3 Re6 (giving back the exchange by ...Re5 is better, but it is a lost ending in any case) 5. Nh6! (threatens Nxf7#) Rf8 which leads us to the cute part of the puzzle, which is the position in #3.
#3: I smiled when I saw how tied down black is. That is also why I made the difficulty :-) out of 10. Here is the hilarity: 1. b5!! Zugzwang! At best, black is forced to give up the exchange, when the queenside pawns are already too far along to be stopped. Black played ...Bf5 and resigned 3 moves later.
#4: Here is a slightly more challenging position. White is up some material, but can't quite break through... or can they? 1. b4!! (kicks the queen away from defence of the d4 square, which will result in a devastating check) Qxb4 2. Qd4+ f6 3. Rxf6 (gxf6+! is technically more accurate, but my opponent had less than 30 seconds left at this point, so I just made the most complicated move I could find that I was sure was okay.) and black flagged searching for a saving resource that was not meant to be.
Posts
4 comments:
h6
I vote for Nf6. Are you worried about 10...Nf6 11.Bg5?
10. ...Qa5. That's the move I wanted to play against Yermolinksy, same position.
All right, more team members!
Wow, we're still following your game, Pete?
Um, if it's worth anything, Chigorin and Lasker both played h6 here, and it seems to be the most common move, especially among high-rated players. Other than that database logic, I don't have much, since we've gone down an opening path I know nothing about.
Post a Comment