Sunday, July 22, 2012

A beautiful miniature

I'm sure some of you have not seen this beautiful miniature, played in 2001 by GM Alex Yermolinsky against Indiana's Emory Tate, who became an IM in 2007. Tate likes to go his own way in the opening. Here he played a type of Schmid Benoni with 1.d4 c5 2.d5 e6 3.Nc3 (Yermo could have played 3.c4, with a regular Benoni) exd5?! 4.Nxd5. On White's sixth move, Fritz much prefers 6.Bf6! to Yermo's 6.Bh4, analyzing 6.Bf6! d6 (6...gxf6?? 7.Nxf6#) 7.Nxe7 Bxe7 (7...gxf6 8.Nxc8 leaves Black with a gruesome pawn structure and a bad bishop) 8.Bxg7 Rh7 9.Bc3, when Black is a pawn down, and against the "Yerminator" might as well resign. After 6.Bh4 Qa5+ 7.c3, Black would have been OK (Fritz says even slightly better) following 7...Nxd5! 8.Qxd5 Nc6 9.e4 d6. Instead, his 7...Nf5?? allowed a stunning coup. Take a look at the diagram below. Do you see it?

Ever since I saw this game, I have tried to pull off the same thing myself in blitz games. I succeeded in Rhine-NN, 5-minute game, playchess.com, November 19, 2007: 1.d4 c5 2.d5 e6 3.Nc3 exd5 4.Nxd5 d6 5.Nf3 Nf6 6.Bg5 Nbd7 7.e4 Qa5+ 8.c3 Nxe4?? 9.Qa4!! Qxa4 10.Nc7#.

2 comments:

Bill Brock said...

It's amazing that such a short game can have so many mistakes by such great players...chess is hard!

Frederick Rhine said...

True - in the space of a couple of moves in a nine-move game the position went from large advantage White to small advantage Black to an instant White win.