An astonishing oversight

What would you play in the diagrammed position?

If you said 10...Nde5! or 10...Nce5!, take full credit. White's position is already resignable after either knight move. White loses two pawns and is forced to move his king. Mega Database 2013 finds 18 games that reached the above position. In 15 of them, Black moved one of the knights to e5. He scored 14.5 points in those 15 games.

If you said anything other than 10...N(either)-e5!, please enroll in Remedial Chess Tactics 101 forthwith. But don't feel too bad: you're in good company. Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest player of all time, also missed it. He played the lemon 10...Nb4?, which would have allowed White to survive after 11.Bd2! when White is only a little worse (-0.47 according to Komodo 9.02). Instead, White played 11.Bb1? and was steamrollered.

How long has the shot 10...Ne5! been known, you ask? For almost 90 years. It was first seen in Norman-Vidmar, Hastings 1925/26, which Black won in short order:

This trap was given in Irving Chernev's book Winning Chess Traps, first published in 1946. The entire game appears, for example, in Chernev and Reinfeld's The Fireside Book of Chess (1949), as well as in more recent works such as the Encyclopedia of Chess Miniatures (2014) and Müller and Knaak's 222 Opening Traps After 1.d4 (2008). It is scarcely believable that Kasparov did not know of this old chestnut. Even if he somehow did not, it is mind-blowing that so great a tactical genius could miss so obvious a shot.

Nothing new under the sun

The same tactical themes are seen again and again. Compare the finishes of these two games. They reached identical positions except for the side on which White castled. In both, 15.Nxc6! is the killer, with the point that 15...bxc6 is met by 16.Qa6#, while 15...Qxe2 is met by the unusual checkmate 16.Nxa7#. The first game is No. 314 in Chernev's classic The 1000 Best Short Games of Chess.

Over sixty years later, I played this blitz game, without knowing of its predecessor:

The astute observer will notice that in my game, 14.Nxc6! was already possible. In fairness to Albert, who was my teammate on the Lane Tech High School chess team, this result was highly atypical of our games at the time. He was much stronger. Later we both became masters. Many years later, he co-founded the chessgames.com website.

Like déjà vu all over again

Earlier this month, I showed you a trap in the Fort Knox Variation of the French Defense where White traps Black's queen on f6 with 8.Bg5! Bxf3 9.Qd2! and if 9...Qxd4, 10.Bb5+. Here's a variant of the same trap with the players' c-pawns exchanged. This requires a small refinement by White, but Black's queen stays trapped. Note that if only future GM Sherzer had read Chernev's The 1000 Best Short Games of Chess, he wouldn't have fallen into this trap!

A trap in the King's Gambit

In the King's Knight's Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Nf3), 3...h6 intending 4...g5 is a respectable line. 3...f6 with the same idea doesn't work so well. This game duplicates Trap No. 133 in Irving Chernev's book Winning Chess Traps, except that in that game Black played 3...g5 and 4...f6?

"Teacher overslept!" answers, part 1

I'm glad the strike ended relatively quickly: otherwise, I'd have been posting delinquent answers well into 2013.  These examples were lifted from Irving Chernev and ChessBase 2012.

Experienced players often resign against masters when they've lost a minor piece.  Beginners should keep playing until they understand why the position is hopelessly lost.

11) White to play

12) Black to play

13) White to play

14) White to play

15) Black to play

16) White to play

17) Black to play

Sometimes good counting skills are more important than brilliance:

Teacher Overslept! (Chess Homeschool, Day 4)

No particular theme today. Number 22 is relatively difficult.

11) White to play

12) Black to play

13) White to play

14) White to play

15) Black to play

16) White to play

17) Black to play

18) White to play

19) Black to play

20) White to play

21) White to play

22) White to play

23) Black to play

24) White to play

Let Them Eat Queens (Chess Homeschool, Day 2)

Another day of prep: whew!  So teachers do this 180 days per year?

Winning the queen doesn't guarantee winning the game, but it certainly helps.  So before you turn on Cartoon Network, try the following quiz: answers tomorrow.  I believe that all of these games finished in 12 moves or less.  Some of you will probably recognize the famous position in the first game.

1) Black to play and win

2) White to play and win

3) Black to play and win

4) White to play and win

5) White to play and win

6) White to play and win

7) Black to play and win

8) White to play and win

9) White to play and win

10) White to play and win

Similar Sandrin slugfests

Irving Chernev, who wrote "Wonders and Curiosities of Chess," would have loved this. The following two games were both played at the U.S. Open, five years apart. The White players were brothers from Chicago named Albert and Angelo Sandrin, who both became Life Masters. In both games, White played exf7+, to which Black responded with ...Kh8. A few moves later, White captured Black's rook on f8 for free and with check, checked again with the capturing piece in order to vacate the f8 square, and then underpromoted his f-pawn to knight, checkmating Black. Commenter "Phony Benoni" (David Moody) at chessgames.com calls the games "definitely a case of sibling rivalry."

Albert's game is from the 1949 U.S. Open, which he won ahead of such luminaries as Larry Evans, Arthur Bisguier, and Anthony Santasiere.

Canal - Capablanca, Budapest 1929

There was one other game that made a deep impression on me in Chernev's Logical Chess: Move By Move.  In Canal-Capablanca, Budapest 1929, it sure looked like Capa was in trouble.  (And indeed FireBird suggests a moment or two where White may have missed an opportunity for advantage.)

Chernev is silent on White's big mistake:

Canal-Capablanca, Budapest 1929

After 31...Ra1

White to move

Black's next couple moves are fairly easy to predict: ...a3, ...a2, ...Rook moves somewhere (with check or attack), and ...a1=Q.  

How can White interfere with this plan? 

von Scheve - Teichmann, Berlin 1907

I suppose it would be appropriate to answer the question in the previous post: it was awfully hard!

Most beginner's books are full of errors like these--by no means does this mean that Logical Chess: Move By Move is a bad book. As Frederick Rhine noted in the previous comments, it wouldn't be surprising for a GM to make the same mistake.  (Chernev's error on move 8 is crude enough for me to notice without a computer, or for an alert beginner to catch.)

Resignation in a drawn position is fairly rare (I confess that I did it against NM William Aramil in 2001.)

Chess is hard!

Jerry Neugarten, the chair of the Illinois Chess Association's Youth Chess Committee, is putting the finishing touches on the ICA's guide to curricula and study resources for young players.  I pulled out my copy of Irving Chernev's Logical Chess: Move by Move, a classic collection of annotated games for beginners, to see whether it belongs on the list.  It does indeed: it's a fun and instructive read.

But my silicon friend discovered something amazing in the final position of the very first game.  Can you discover it, too, using wetware alone?

 von Scheve - Teichmann, Berlin 1907

Position after 17...Bxf2

White to play resigned

Chernev explains White's resignation: "Black's threat was 18...Qh3+ 19.Nh2 Qxh2#."  ("#" is the abbreviation for "checkmate".)  "As 18.Rxf2 runs into 18...Nxf2#, there was no escape."

NEVER TRUST ANYTHING YOU READ IN A CHESS BOOK!  (This goes double for blogs written by patzers.)  99.9% of the time, the book will be right and you'll discover why your challenge was wrong.  But every so often, you'll discover something cool.

A Chicago original

J.R. Houghteling was a strong Chicago player around the turn of the 20th century. Here is his most famous game. White's play is feeble, but Houghteling concludes the game with a beautiful checkmate. Irving Chernev, in his classic The Thousand Best Short Games of Chess, noted that Bigelow called the final position "a rainbow of Bishops and Knights." Francis Wellmuth in The Golden Treasury of Chess wrote that it was "[o]ne of the most extraordinary mates ever given in actual play."

The wonderful chess writer and novelist Tim Krabbé once questioned the game's veracity (scroll down to No. 355), but later acknowledged, "A communication by Frederick Rhine makes it clear that speculations of [Dodge-Houghteling] being a hoax, are unjustified." In the same post, he gave several later examples of similar mates.