Thursday, August 19, 2010

Cute miniature, cute story

Reigning Chicago Open champion Loek Van Wely got crushed by Hikaru Nakamura today at the NH Youth versus Experience tournament.  Before you read Ian Rogers's hilarious report on Chess Life Online, see if you can solve this quiz:

 White to play and win
(there are at least two solutions; which line is most forcing?)

Nakamura and Anish Giri are now tied for the youth lead, but Hikaru still has to play both Svidler and Gelfand....

2 comments:

Frederick Rhine said...

I'll go with 1.Rb6! and now (a) 1...Nxb6 2.Nf6+! and 3.Qd8#; (b) 1...Qxb7 2.Rxb7 Bxb7 3.Nc7+ and 4.Nxa8.

Frederick Rhine said...

Between winning in 17 moves using the exact line given in Van Wely's own soon-to-be-published analysis, and holding a dead-lost rook ending against him, Nakamura's making Van Wely look pretty silly.