Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Enlightened by Houdini

It's always educational to analyze one's games, even "stupid" games like online blitz games, with a strong engine like Houdini. In the following game, for example, I made a major tactical hiccup on move 10, which should have dropped a piece - to which I, and apparently also my opponent, were oblivious. Then I did something right, exploiting his inaccuracy on move 15, and got "an easily won game." I blundered on move 23 with a "loose" move, which he exploited with a tactic that should have left me scrambling for a draw. But just two moves later he fell into a back-rank trap that left me in an ending an exchange up. Thanks to the wonders of premove, I was able to convert it into a win despite the dearth of time on my clock.

2 comments:

Frederick Rhine said...

Back to studying more boring things.

Frederick Rhine said...

The overlooked trap on move 10 is slightly novel to my eyes. It combines the idea of exchanging the pawn on d5 for that on c4 (or vice versa), followed by Q-R4+ (Qa4+ or Qa5+) picking up a loose bishop on KN5 (g5 or g4, as the case may be), e.g. Moor-Dolzhikova, Oslo 2011 (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1641574) with that of the zwischenzug 1...dxc4 2.Bxf6 cxd3! attacking a queen on c2, as in a famous trap in the Cambridge Springs Variation, e.g. Safa-Al Khelaifi, Asian Games 2010 (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1600228).