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.

A spectacular game

This is one of my three favorite games that I have played. The others are K.Thompson-Rhine, 1992 and Rhine-Sprenkle, 1981. This is the only one of the three that isn't published in Chess Informant I should've submitted this one too, but I got lazy. It's a beautiful game, primarily because of my opponent's efforts - he sacrificed, or offered to sacrifice, a pawn, knight, bishop, rook, and queen - literally every kind of piece except his king. The cold, dispassionate engine (Houdini 3) tells me that had I played slightly differently (23.Qc2!), I would have had a large advantage. But as "Kinghunt" once observed on chessgames.com, "This is a King's Indian Defence - Black is always objectively lost until suddenly Black wins." Or draws, in this case.

Up through 15.c5, the game was all book. My opponent's 15...c6!? was a novelty. I was quite happy after 23.Qb3, thinking that I was a pawn up for little compensation. I could meet 23...f3 with 24.g3 Qh3 25.Bf1. Boerkoel's 23...Ne3!! came as a huge shock. The main points are that Black threatens to win with both 24....Nxg2 25.Kxg2 f3+ and 24...f3 25.g3 Qh3 26.Bf1 Nxf1, and if White plays 24.fxe3, 24...fxe3 threatens 25...Qxh2#, 25...Qxe4, and 25...f2+. The subtle 23.Qc2! would have avoided this shot; since it would have guarded my knight, I could have met 23...Ne3?? with simply 24.fxe3 fxe3 25.g3 and wins. I still thought I was winning after 26.Kxf2. After 26...Bxg3+!, the light finally dawned: I had to allow perpetual check.

An old chestnut, or rather two of them

From the diagrammed position, Black's fatal blunder 9...Ng4?? occurred 58 times in Mega Database 2013. The position arises from a number of different move orders, including the Sicilian Accelerated Dragon, Maroczy Bind, as below; the Symmetrical English (1.c4 c5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Nc3 Nc6 4.d4 cxd4 5.Nxd4 g6 6.e4 Bg7 7.Be3 d6 8.Be2 0-0 9.0-0); and the King's Indian (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 0-0 5.Nf3 c5 6.Be2 cxd4 7.Nxd4 Nc6 8.Be3 d6 9.0-0).

I remembered seeing this trap in GM Larry Evans' 1970 book Chess Catechism (p. 72), or thought I had. It turned out that Evans was referring to a very similar trap in the Sicilian Dragon, where White's pawn is still on c2 and Black hasn't castled. Alekhine, in his famous book of the New York 1924 tournament (Lasker's immortal triumph, at age 55), annotating the game below, wrote of Réti's eighth move, "More cautious is 8.P-KR3, for now Black can play ...N-KN5." Evans' correspondent had dutifully played the recommended 8...N-KN5 (8...Ng4) in his own game, only to be rudely awakened by 9.Bxg4!, which works just as well as in the other version. This version of the trap is seen much less often (8...Ng4 was played five times in Mega Database 2013), and, oddly, the blunderer is much more successful! In the first version of the trap, White played 10.Bxg4! 56 out of 58 times. On the 52 occasions that Black played 10...Bxg4, White found the winning follow-up 11.Nxc6! 36 times. In the present version, incredibly, White found the winning 9.Bxg4! only once in five games, and only scored 30%! Vepkhvishvili-Wiedersich, Pardubice Open 1993 (not in Mega) is one of the rare games where White found 9.Bxg4!

A trap in the King's Indian?

The best-scoring line against the King's Indian Defense is the flexible 5.h3! 0-0 6.Bg5! In Mega Database 2013, White scores a gaudy 64.6% in 2938 games! That is better than he does against garbage like the Englund Gambit, where he only scores 57.7% in 1280 games in the main line (1.d4 e5? 2.dxe5 Nc6 3.Nf3 Qe7) - although White does get 66.8% with 4.Qd5!, almost forcing Black to make his pawn sac permanent with 4...f6, when White's best-scoring line is 5.exf6 Nxf6 6.Qb3 d5 7.Bg5! (82.7%, but with a tiny sample size - only 27 games). But I digress.

The 5.h3 0-0 6.Bg5 line also sets a little trap: Black's most natural and thematic move, 6...e5, is here a blunder, dropping a pawn to 7.dxe5 dxe5 8.Qxd8 Rxd8 9.Nd5! GM Yury Shulman in his lecture at the North Shore Chess Center last year discussed a 1996 game in which he fell into this trap. Though disgusted with himself, he played on as though nothing had happened. He went on to roll his 2460-rated opponent like a joint, as NM Marvin Dandridge would say:

Where did White go wrong? According to Houdini 3, the natural 11.Nxc7 was already a small inaccuracy, and 12.Nd5 a more serious one. After 12...h6! White had to surrender his dark-squared bishop for Black's knight. This is a big positional concession, as Black's unopposed dark-squared bishop will be a holy terror once it sets up camp on c5. Black already had sufficient compensation for his accidentally sacrificed pawn, and White's game went downhill from there. (Note that all numerical assessments in this and the following game are by Houdini 3.)

How should White play? As I say, Houdini says that 11.Nxc7 is already a little inaccurate. But 11.0-0-0, White's most successful move (3-0 in Mega 2013), is actually a blunder. As I indicate in my notes to the above game, Houdini then analyzes 10...Rf8 11. Nxc7 Nxe4! as leading to equality. White's best move is instead 11.Rd1!, threatening to win a piece with 12.Nxf6+. Note that unlike the similar 11.0-0-0 it does not leave f2 vulnerable to a knight fork. After 11.Rd1!, Black must lose a tempo with 11...Rf8, and now 12.Nxc7 Rb8 13.f3! leaves White with an advantage that Houdini assesses as +1.32.

This line is seen in the following game. Incidentally, the note to Black's 9th move is very interesting. Houdini considers 9...Nbd7, dropping the c-pawn and leading to a position where White has a +1.32 advantage, inferior to surrendering the exchange with either 9...Nxd5 10.Bxd8 Nf6 (+0.94) or 9...Rxd5 10.cxd5 Ne4 (+1.09).

Busy weekend: Downers Grove repeats as CICL champions

Congratulations to DGCC on their second consecutive win! Motorola Kings, DRW Trading, and the Rogue Squadron tied for second.

I had never been to Fermilab before: what a great site! After the event, I turned the wrong way and had the pleasure of tracing the cyclotron's path above ground.

Round 1 was played during the workweek.  This painful game (well, painful for me) was instrumental in Motorola's win over the Rogue Squadron. The sac on move 27 was dictated by the match situation (a draw was worthless), but Black had missed a convincing win a couple moves earlier with 24...Nxe2! followed by the fork on f3. Igor's game continuation was good enough:

Saturday was more fun for us.  In the final round match Rogue Squadron-Fermilab, I had the pleasure of kibitzing this interesting Sicilian Rossolimo battle between David Franklin and Dmitri Sergatskov.  David annotates:

The Tomb Game

For Halloween, I present one of the most horrifying games ever - and played in the Halloween Open, no less. I refer, of course, to the dreaded Tomb Game: Harper-Zuk, Halloween Open 1971. If White's position doesn't give you nightmares, nothing will.

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

David Franklin annotates a game from the first round of the CICL season. With the center locked, the White king wanders out of the shire and wanders back with a win in its pocketses.

Steinitz was famous for king walks under fire, but Petrosian lifted the idea of the prophlyactic king walk (evacuating His Majesty from the kingside prior to a kingside break) from Nimzowitsch.
 

More from the Illinois Open

Jimi Akintonde is a very talented young player with a predilection for concrete, forcing play. Tam Nguyen may seem mild-mannered, but I've never known him to back down from a fight. And if the opening is the Sãmisch Variation of the King's Indian, the game will be entertaining.

Don't ask me what's going on....

As someone who gave up on the King's Indian more than twenty years ago, I always root for the queenside attack. So FM Eric Rosen (who usually doesn't throw pieces to the wind) makes me happy in the following game.  A piece gets sacked on 28, then an Exchange a few moves later...so I guess that's a deferred rook sacrifice.

Black sacs back to reach a not-quite-tenable rook ending, and Eric gets to display his typical outstanding technique.

The talented loser of this game, IM Daniel Naroditsky, is the author of the second third book I've ever read that was written by a teenager (I'm not sure that I finished Une Saison en Enfer, post pedantically amended to include Radiguet's Le Diable au Corps: oh you Frenchies). Naroditsky's Mastering Positional Chess is strongly recommended.

London Round 4: Anand 0 - Nakamura 1 !!!

Yesterday, GMHikaru tweeted, "The single most important thing in life is to believe in yourself regardless of what everyone else says" After Nakamura's disastrous showing in the Tal Memorial in Moscow, this blogger was one of the doubters. It is good to be proven wrong!

In the first four rounds of this event, Nakamura has drawn Kramnik, beaten Aronian, lost to Carlsen, and beaten Anand. That's +1 against the top four players in the world.

In the Classical King's Indian, White's kingside attack arrives first.  Indeed, in the position after move 21, it looks like Nakamura is about to get swept off the board.

But Black is attacking White's king!  If Black breaks through, Black will bring pain.  The biggest win in Hikaru's career?

More to follow!

Young 1 - Defibaugh 0

Just as in last week's game, Angelo Young plays rope-a-dope and exploits a weakness on the light squares. Black hung a pawn on move 11, so the execution is a bit more routine.

From the Illinois Open

It is good to draw a grandmaster in the first round!

A trap in the King's Indian

In the King's Indian Defense, after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 0-0 6.Be2, usual is 6...e5 7.0-0, and now Black's most popular moves are 7...Nc6, 7...Nbd7, and even 7...Na6. Sometimes Black futzes around and first plays 6...Nbd7 7.0-0, and now a waiting move like 7...Re8?! or 7...c6?!, thinking that Black need not rush to play ...e5. This is a bad idea, since 8.e5! followed by the pawn sacrifice e6! wrecks Black's pawn structure. In the game below, Black made things worse (as he/she usually does) with 8...dex5 9.dxe5 Ng4 (better is 9...Ne8!, allowing the pawn sac 10.e6! fxe6 11.Ng5) 10.e6! fxe6? (10...Nde5! is better) 11.Ng5! (diagram). I have reached this (or a similar position with Black's pawn back on c6 and ...Re8 having been played) dozens of times in Internet games. Black is already lost in light of White's threats of 12.Bxg4 (winning a piece) and 12.Nxe6 (winning the exchange). Like most of my opponents, Black responded with the "traditional" 11...Nde5?, losing a piece, and lost quickly.

Kavalek remembers Evans

Mark Taimanov-Larry Evans

USSR-USA match, New York 1955

Black to play

Taimanov has just sacrificed material with 19.Rxc7.  If Black plays the natural 19...Qxc7, White plays the powerful 20.d6.  What to do?

Kavalek annotates this beautiful win by Evans.

A crush on Board 1

Gurevich-Barcenilla, 

Chicago Blaze - Arizona Scorpion

U.S. Chess League September 20, 2010

White to play and win quickly

Dmitry Gurevich is a specialist in the 9.Ne1 variation of the King's Indian.  He decides that maintaining a knight on e6 is worth a little trouble, and he's proved right!