The rarely-sprung trap

1.e4 Nf6 2.e5 Nd5 3.d4 e6?! 4.c4 Bb4+?? is an ingenious but bad way of playing Alekhine's Defense. It is seen 19 times in Mega Database 2013. Some good players had White, including the Filipino GM and former Candidate Eugenio Torre, and two other players rated over 2300. In 16 of those games, White played 5.Bd2; in the other three, he played 5.Nd2. In none of the games did White play 5.Ke2!, winning a piece, since after either 5...Nb6 6.c5 or 5...Ne7 6.a3, Black's bishop is trapped and will be lost. White, modestly rated 1197, did find the sockdolager (as the old-time writers liked to say) in the below correspondence game, presumably aided by the greater time available for reflection.

This game is from Karsten Müller and Rainer Knaak's book 222 Opening Traps After 1.e4, p. 18. I first learned of this trap in Tim Krabbé's wonderful Open Chess Diary (scroll down to No. 381). As I have previously noted, I have myself won with the mirror image of this trap, 1.d4 Nc6 2.d5 Ne5 3.e4 d6 4.f4 Bg4?? 5.Qd2! and Black loses a piece just as in the original version.

Winning a drawn game

In the following game, I could have played a promising exchange sac on move 11, and could have won a clear pawn on move 12. Instead, I played several inferior moves, giving White close to a winning position by move 18. White in turn played some inferior moves, allowing me to escape into what should have been a dead-drawn ending with rook and three pawns against rook and three pawns on the same same of the board. Oh well, beats a loss, right? But much to my surprise, White played extremely passively and I was able to eke out a win. I'm now 87-0-0 on GameKnot, though as I keep saying, my perfect score will come to an end soon. (This was one of the games that was supposed to end it.)

My opponent was no GM, to be sure, but even the best players can screw up simple rook endings. GM Alex Onischuk (in)famously lost a "dead drawn" 3 pawns versus 2 pawns ending at last year's Olympiad, and even then-World Champion Kasparov once lost a 4 pawns versus 3 pawns ending, another easy theoretical draw. On Facebook, NM Gopal Menon recently annotated his game against GM Alex Shabalov. After a long fight, Shabalov accepted Gopal's draw offer. When Gopal later analyzed the game, he was shocked to realize that Shabalov was completely winning in the final position! Chess is a hard game.

Queen sac-a-palooza

This is a fun game, concluding with two pseudo-queen sacrifices, but Houdini as usual points out improvements for me. Obvious ones. D'oh! This game upped my record on GameKnot.com to 29-0.

Really silly Internet game

I just started playing on GameKnot.com, which has correspondence games with a minimum length of 2 days per move. That was the time control for the following game, believe it or not. GameKnot assigns one an initial rating of 1200 and initially only lets one play against very low-rated players. That probably explains why I'm 27-0 thus far. This game raised my rating to a walloping 1612, exactly 800 points below my USCF correspondence rating. This game is even sillier than most, but the final mate is kind of picturesque, albeit no Dodge-Houghteling :

Louisville vs. Chicago, 1877

John Dunlap Adair
The Hand-Book of Chicago Biography,
ed. John J. Flinn (Chicago: 1893), p.20

Thanks to our fellow blogger at A Chess Reader for pointing us to John S. Hilbert's great article on Chess Cafe.

I really don't link to Chess Cafe enough, as Chicago-themed items are relatively infrequent. But it's one of the best chess sites on the web.

Will Tseng wins 2008 Electronic Knights, 2010 Palciauskas

I most recently saw Will working the floor as a volunteer TD during the Youth Chess Foundation of Chicago's event at Rickover Naval Academy. I knew he was a strong player, but I had no idea how strong!  Will recently won the USCF's 2008 Electronic Knights championship, and Alex Dunne wrote a nice feature on him in January's Chess Life.  Check it out!  (I hope to get permission to republish the article next month for non-subscribers.)

In modern correspondence play, email has replaced post cards.  In USCF events, the players are not allowed to consult chess engines (Fritz, Houdini, Rybka...), although they are allowed to perform research in chess books and computer databases.  (In international correspondence play, engines are allowed.)  Jerry Neugarten asked about the date: why 2008?. Well, the event has a preliminary, semi-finals, and finals, and each game takes quite a while to complete. Correspondence play is a great deal of fun, and you rapidly discover how little you and your opponent really understand about this game.

Will also recently tied for first in the 2010 Victor Palciauskas championship (in honor of the retired Lithuanian-American correspondence World Champion, who earned his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois). Will played a beautiful attacking game again James Vaughn that is also featured by Alex Dunne this month at Chess Life Online.  (The gentleman in the suit looking vaguely like Col. Sanders is Alex Dunne: I remember playing in a tournament with him circa 1975 when he looked more like one of Hell's Angels.)

Congratulations to Will for earning two big championship titles!