The Ronen Horror Blunder Show!

Just in time for Halloween, Israeli GM Ronen Har-Zvi gives us Part I of The Ronen Horror Blunder Show!, a terrifying collection of blunders in 2012 by super-GMs like Carlsen, Aronian, Topalov, and Gelfand. If you thought your blunders were bad, wait till you see the whoppers produced by the 2700+ crowd. Good stuff.

An aside: Har-Zvi became famous, 10 years later, for having introduced a stunning novelty in the 3.Bb5+ Sicilian, 16...d5!!, in Rublevsky-Har-Zvi, 1993, a game that does not appear in the databases, nor in Chess Informant. Somehow that game, and 16...d5!!, remained unknown to almost everyone until 2003, when the move was "reintroduced" in Delchev-Ivanchuk and other games. Another fun fact: after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bb5+ Bd7 4.Bxd7+, 4...Nxd7 is played much less often than the stock 3...Qxd7, but scores better. GM John Fedorowicz, at his lecture at the North Shore Chess Center earlier this month, revealed that 3...Bd7 4.Bxd7+ Nxd7 is his favorite line against 3.Bb5+. Then there's 3...Kxd7??!, played in the eight-move draw Kochyev-Levin, 1992, but somehow that one hasn't caught on.

Three days of grandmaster lessons for only $150!

Such a deal at the North Shore Chess Center: each of the three training sessions is six hours long!

• Saturday September 22, 2012 - Grandmaster Yury Shulman 
• Saturday  October 20, 2012 - Grandmaster John Fedorowicz 
• Saturday November 17, 2012 - Grandmaster Larry Christiansen

I've had the pleasure of listening to all three analyze (Christiansen post-mortemed one of my games in a Montréal dormitory back in 1974: makes me feel old).  Yury, Fed, and Larry are all excellent communicators and nice people.  This is a really great deal, so register now!

Eric Rosen knocks off his first grandmaster

Fedorowicz-Rosen

Black to play and win

Eric Rosen, a 15-year-old student at Niles North High School, had an OK summer as a chess player.  He won the U.S. Junior Open, earned the National Master title, and beat his first Grandmaster in the final round of the 2009 U.S. Open.

GM John Fedorowicz introduced a risky-looking but basically sound opening novelty, which Eric managed to neutralize.  Even GMs can make mistakes: in the above position, Fedorowicz has just played his king from d2 to c3.  White would have been perfectly OK after 16.Kd2-c1!, but Black could have forced a draw.  (For full analysis of this game, see the September Illinois Chess Bulletin.)

But after 16.Kd2-c3??, Black has a quick kill.  Can you find it?