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.

Still another Englund Gambit trap

I have previously written several posts about traps in the Englund Gambit (1.d4 e5? or, to be charitable, 1.d4 e5?!). There are two "official" refutations of the main line of the gambit: after 2.dxe5 Nc6 3.Nf3 Qe7, one begins with 4.Bf4 (or 4.Bg5) Qb4+ 5.Bd2 Qxc3 6.Nc3!, the other with 4.Qd5. As I've previously noted, indiscriminately combining the two can lead to disaster. Below is another instance of this. After 5.Bg5?? (5.Nc3!) Qb4+!, White is losing after either 6.Bd2 Qxb2 7.Bc3 Bb4, as in the game, or 6.Qd2 Qxb2 7.Qc3 Bb4. The final position is very reminiscent of that arising after the classic Englund trap, 4.Bf4 Qb4+ 5.Bd2 Qxb2 6.Bc3?? Bb4! 7.Qd2 Bxc3 8.Qxc3 Qc1#.

A trap in Larsen's Opening

The following game illustrates what happens if White tries to grab a pawn in Larsen's Opening with 6.fxe5 fxe5 7.Bxc6+? bxc6 8.Bxe5?? Black wins by force. Instead, White should play 6.Qh5+ g6 7.Qh4 exf4 8.exf4 Bd7 9.Nf3 Nb4 10.Bxd7+ Qxd7 11.Na3 O-O-O or 6.fxe5 fxe5 7.Nf3 Bg4 8.h3 Bxf3 9.Qxf3 Nf6 10.Nc3 a6, in either case with approximate equality. Note that in the game continuation, 14...Bf5!, staying in the middlegame, was even better than allowing White to go into a lost endgame.

Note also that 10...Qxh1!, as played, was much better the tempting 10...Bg4?! I think that I once had the White side of this many years ago against James Fagan in a blitz tournament at the Elbo Room. White survives after 11.Nc3!, and now (a) 11...Qg6 12.Bxh8! Bxd1 13.Nxd1!, when White is only a little worse, or (b) 11...Qxh1 12.Qxg4 Qxg1+ 13.Ke2 Qxa1 14.Nxd5 Qh1 15.Qe6+ Be7 [15...Kd8 16.Nf6 (16.Bf6+ also draws) 16...Qg2+ 17.Kd3 Qf1+ 18.Ke4 Qh1+ 19.Kd3 with a draw by perpetual check] 16.Nxc7+ Kd8 17.Nxa8.

ADDENDUM: White can also grab the pawn immediately on move 7 without first playing Bxc6+. It turns out that this is a better try, although still weak. After 7.Bxe5 Qh4+ 8.g3 Qe4 9.Bxg7 Qxh1 10.Qh5+ Ke7 11.Qh4+ Kf7 12.Bxh8 Qxg1+ 13.Bf1 Bf5 14.Nc3 Nge7 15.Ne2 Qh1 16.Bc3 Ne5 17.O-O-O Qe4 18.Qxe4 dxe4 Black is up a piece for two pawns. The alternative 11.Kf1 is clearly winning for Black after 11...Be6 12.Be2 Be5 13.Bxh8 [or 13.Bxe5 Nxe5 14.Qxe5 Rf8+ 15.Bf3 Rxf3+ 16.Ke2 Qxg1 17.Qxc7+ (17.Nc3 Qg2+ 18.Kd3 Nf6) 17... Kf6] 13...Rf8+ 14.Bf3 Bxh8.

A trap in the Caro-Kann Defense, Exchange Variation

I found this trap in Amatzia Avni's excellent book Danger in Chess: How to Avoid Making Blunders. The identical trap can arise by transposition from other openings, such as the London System (1.d4 d5 2.Bf4). The winning idea is sufficiently unusual that most White players missed it - ChessBase shows that in the position after Black's 12th move, only 5 out of 31 players found the winning move! All six masters and experts that reached the position played 13.Nxe5??, scoring only 3-3.

Another trap in the Caro-Kann, Two Knights Variation

Bobby Fischer wrote in My 60 Memorable Games that the purpose of the Two Knights Variation against the Caro-Kann Defense (1.e4 c6 2.Nc3 d5 3.Nf3) "is to exclude the possibility of" ...Bf5. As I've showed previously, Black indeed gets in big trouble if he proceeds in stereotyped fashion with 3...dxe4 4.Nxe4 Bf5?! 5.Ng3 Bg6?! But the Two Knights Variation is no one-trick pony. The following game shows another, much less-known trap in the 3...Bg4 line, which is considered Black's best. As the game and notes show, after 4.d4!?, Black gets in hot water if he tries to win a pawn with the natural 4...dxe4 5.Nxe4 Bxf3 6.Qxf3 Qxd4. Better is the solid 4...e6!, which gives Black a plus score in the databases. Scott Thomson ("keypusher" on ChessGames.com) sets the stage for the game:

I don't have the score, but as our Secretary of State might say it is seared -- seared! in my memory. . . . It was when I lived in England in the early 90s, and for some reason -- perhaps a cholera epidemic -- I was playing first board for Wood Green in a team match. There was a pub next door, to which my opponent repaired after each move (which he took about five seconds on).

Deceived by his opponent's alcohol consumption and seemingly reckless play, Scott proceeded to lose a miniature in humiliating fashion. We've all been there.

Another trap in From's Gambit

DO NOT play 1.f4 unless you have an answer ready for From's Gambit, 1...e5!? King's Gambiteers can happily play 2.e4. The line White played in the game was fine up to a point. IM Tim Taylor in his book Bird's Opening recommends 7.d4 Ng6 8.Nxg6 hxg6 9.Qd3! Nc6 10.c3! Bf5 11.e4 Qe7 12.Bg2 0-0-0 13.Be3 Bd7 14.Bf2!, when Black doesn't have enough compensation for the gambit pawn. Another line is 5.d4 g4 6.Ne5!, heading into a slightly better ending for White after 6...Bxe5 7.dxe5 Qxd1+ 8.Kxd1. Instead of playing these reasonable lines, most of my blitz opponents have played ridiculously and gotten crushed. A case in point:

The risky Katalimov Sicilian

Boris Katalimov (or Katalymov) (1932-2012) was a strong Soviet (later Kazakh) master who played against the greats of Soviet chess, often successfully. FIDE finally awarded him the International Master title in 1996, although at his best he surely would have been a grandmaster by today's standards. According to Chessmetrics, at his peak in May 1978 he was the No. 84 player in the world. He was still playing actively and well the year before his death, scoring a respectable 7-4 (no draws!) at the 2011 World Senior Championship.

Katalimov played imaginatively in the openings, often playing the Sokolsky (1.b4) as White. In the Sicilian Defense, the Katalimov Variation of the Sicilian Defense (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 b6) is named for him. It is probably playable if Black knows what he is doing. The French GM Christian Bauer is a devotee, and seems to score very well with it. A few other GMs, such as Humpy Koneru and Stuart Conquest, play it occasionally. However, it is a demanding line for Black, who can easily get blown off the board if he plays carelessly. This is well-illustrated by the following game, where Black greedily grabbed two pawns in the opening and was annihilated by White. The notes to the game illustrate some other crushing wins by White.

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.

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!

Breaking into Fort Knox

This is a pretty common trap in the French Defense, Fort Knox Variation (10 times in Mega Database 2013). I've played it several times myself. Amazingly enough, the following game was played in the semifinals of the USSR Championship! White traps Black's queen with 8.Bg5!, a common motif in the French. Black wriggles with 8...Bxf3, seemingly escaping (9.Qxf3? Qxf3; 9.Bxf6?? Bxd1; 9.gxf3?? Qxg5), but White keeps the queen trapped with 9.Qd2!, when 9...Qxd4 would be met by 10.Bb5+ followed by Qxd4.

ADDENDUM: I see that ChessNetwork did a YouTube video on this trap.

FURTHER ADDENDUM: A slightly different version of this trap occurred in Roitburd-Alvarez Vila, Wch U18 Girls Oropesa del Mar 2000 after 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bd3 dxe4 5.Nxe4 b6 6.Nf3 Bb7 7.Nxf6+ Qxf6?? 8.Bg5! (1-0, 25).

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.

We play blitz

Beware of this sort of thing - White pieces converging on c7 - in the Sicilian.

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!

Assassinating the Sniper

A trap in the Sicilian, Tal Gambit

Another game from my recently ended 151-0-0 winning streak on GameKnot.com.

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).

A trap in the Ruy Lopez, Open Variation

The following game illustrates an unusual line against the Open Variation of the Ruy Lopez, 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0-0 Nxe4 6.Re1!? Objectively, it gives White no advantage. But after a couple of seemingly minor inaccuracies Black, a player of near FIDE Master strength, found herself on the wrong end of a miniature. Note that a similar line is possible as a means of avoiding the "Berlin Wall": 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Bb5 Nf6 4.0-0 Nxe4 5.Re1. That line has a little more bite, and was recommended by Larry Kaufman in his 2004 book The Chess Advantage in Black and White.

ADDENDUM: For essentially the same trap against the Berlin Variation of the Ruy Lopez, see Collins-Spanton, Hastings 2009. But see Valenti-Lanzani, Milan 2004, where Black successfully deviated and drew.

It takes two to "Tango"

My opponent in the following game found a new way to lose a pawn as White against the Black Knights' Tango (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 Nc6!?). He began with 3.d5!?, which IM Richard Palliser calls "The Lunge" in his book on the opening, tango! At first blush, the move looks strong. White hopes to chase Black's knights with his pawns and force them back in disarray, à la Borochow-Fine, Kujoth-Fashingbauer, Marshall-Rogosin, and various games in the Halloween Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Nxe5?! Nxe5 5.d4). Something like that did happen in Tate-Orlov, 1995. But if Black plays correctly, White gets little or no advantage with 3.d5. 3.Nf3 and 3.Nc3 are much more commonly seen, and more successful in practice.

White's 4.Qc2 was not in the spirit of The Lunge. White should continue his aggression with 4.e4 (when 4...Nxe4?? 5.Qd4 wins for White) or even Tate's 4.f4!?, offering the c-pawn as a gambit (4...Nxc4 5.e4). White's 7.a3? was an unfortunate theoretical novelty. Another passive, time-wasting move, it dropped a pawn to the simple tactic 7...Bxd2+ 8.Nxd2 exd5 9.cxd5 Nxd5! The lost pawn should have been the extent of the damage. Surely no one would be so naïve as to take the knight, which would give me the choice of two mates in two, or a mate in four? To my astonishment, my opponent fell into it hook, line, and sinker. I'm now 110-0-0 on GameKnot, with an Orwellian 1984 rating.