Morphy's Knight in the Corner

For me, the most amazing thing about Morphy was not how far ahead he was of other players at that time. For me, it was the phenomenal ability to play crazy tactical positions blindfold, and his brilliance at odds games. Here's a game he won when he was about 12 against his uncle, playing at odds of a rook!

The final position is quite extraordinary, with a knight on h8 delivering mate!

Of course Black could have defended better, but that is hardly the point. Building a repertoire of mating patterns is more important than building an opening repertoire for most players. Building tactical awareness  and vision is the single most important improvement factor for beginners, and even intermediate level players.

Chessbase 13 allows a search of similar moves, and the unusual Ng6xh8 is certainly a move worth checking out. The database search brought up 751 games where the move Ng6xh8 has been played, of which white scores over 70%. One game that isn't in the database is Potter-Matthews London 1858.

1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3 [The Danish Gambit] 3..c5 4.Nf3 d6 5.Bc4 Nc6

So the first thing to consider if you really want to get a Ng6xh8 manouvre in, is that fast development is the key to early attacks. Morphy knew this as well as anyone. Open lines help as well! 6.0-0 d3 7.Re1 Bg4

Black's play has been too slow, too many pawn moves. If the centre was open, then black's king would be in the firing line. 8.e5 Nxe5? [one pawn grab too many]

9.Nxe5!! An excellent queen sacrifice 9..Bxd1

Now there's a discovered check on the e-file crying out to be played, but Potter wants more, he wants it to be a double check. 10.Bb5+ Ke7 11.Bg5+! A fantastic check skewering black's queen.

11..f6 Not the best defence, but black was lost whatever he did, so he might as well block the check and hold on to his queen. Anyway, it lets us see another Nxh8# move!!

Now it's mate in 2 starting with the double check 12.Ng6+ Kf7 13.Nxh8#

A very similar position has arisen to the Morphy-Le Carpentier game!

And for those of you who think these things are a bygone relic of the 1800's, here's a game from the 2000's. Now it won't be Grand Masters playing this sort of chess anymore, but then again, the majority of players reading this blog won't be Grand Masters. And even the GM's will have a chance to play this sort of thing during their simuls. So look at these games, add the pattern to your repertoire, and most importantly, don't let these things happen to you.

In this position white has sacrificed a piece, but now has mate in 2 starting with the double check 1.Ng6+ and then 1..Kxf7 2.Nxh8#

Line Opening with Paul Morphy

I put up a couple of positions by the great Paul Morphy from his most famous games the other day. Time to have a look.

Paulsen-Morphy USA ch 1857

This has been my game of the week this week for showing to kids. It starts with a sensible 4 knight's opening, there are some nice tricks, and some strange/poor moves that are instructive. Morphy, as black in this position played to his strength which was opening lines for rapid development. He came up with the great sacrifice, 17..Qxf3!! Paulsen must take back 18.gxf3

White's king has been ripped open, and Morphy's pieces now stream into the holes. 18..Rg6+ 19.Kh1 Bh3

[The threat is 20..Bg2+ 21.Kg1 Bxf3#. 20.Rg1 is not playable as white is mated after 20..Rxg1+ 21.Kxg1 Re1+ 22.Qf1 Rxf1#] Paulsen carried on but was forced to resign on move 28. Morphy did miss a couple of quicker mates, but the sacrifice of the queen on f3 to open lines was simply excellent.

The second position I put up was from the game Bird-Morphy London 1858, one of the most analysed games in history.

Bird-Morphy (m5) London 1858

I wonder if Morphy was thinking about his masterpiece against Paulsen from the previous year when he came up with a plan to offer his queen to open lines for rook and bishop. 17..Rxf2 An astounding idea, opening the third rank. This move, and the few following have been subject to an immense amount of analysis over the years. Was this sacrifice correct? Should the game have ended a win for black, a draw? Try googling bird-morphy and see what results come up, or just try to make the white defence stronger. 18.Bxf2 Qa3!!

An amazing queen move from Morphy! Obviously, the queen can't be taken, 19.axb3 Bxa3#. Notice the similarity to the Paulsen game? Bird, who wasn't the best defender succumbed to the onslaught on move 29, and one of the greatest queen moves of all time proved successful.

More Morphy to come....

International Chess Day

Did you know that July 20th is International Chess Day? No? Well, neither did I! Well, actually, I knew there was an International Chess Day, and it was sometime in the middle of the year, but July 20th didn't ring any bells of recognition for me.

The 20th of July has been chosen to represent a special day for chess as it was the day in 1924 when FIDE, the international governing body was founded. Now I have to say that I can think of a heap of better days to commemorate chess, as FIDE has not done a brilliant job of uniting the chess world over the years. FIDE claimed the rights to the World Championship after the second World War and the organisation of this event gave the governing body some level of credence. However, it has always fought against individuals and national federations to maintain its central governing position, and through the Presidencies of Campomanes and Ilyumshinov the chess world seems to have become more divided than ever.

So why not choose a date that can rally chess players, and means something to all, rather than a celebration of an organisation which has seen to be divisive, money-grabbing, corrupt...

Here's a few:

October 21 - The most famous game in history, the Opera House game was played on this day in 1858

January 11 - The start date of the first 'official' World Championship between Steinitz and Zukertort (pre FIDE times) in 1886 (or March 19th, the date that Steinitz was crowned as the first World Champion)

May 20 - Birth date of Max Euwe, the only person to be a World Champion, amateur World Champion, and President of FIDE, though not all at the same time! (Of course, the birth date of any random chess great could be used and it make us happy).

I'm pretty sure that in the scheme of things, the founding of FIDE is not high up in the list of things that mean most to chess players!

Anyway, Happy International Chess Day!

Learning from Morphy

Yesterday I put up a relatively easy position to solve. As this week I am teaching the joys of tactics to primary school kids, and using games and positions from Paul Morphy's career.

Black to play

This was from a blindfold game, and Morphy as black came out with the excellent discovered attack, 1..Ng3!!. Discovered attacks are particularly difficult for kids to see so I try to show them plenty of examples, getting them thinking of the whole board and the ways that piece moves will affect other pieces. It also shows that tactics help us to make moves that would be otherwise unthinkable, like putting a knight on a square where 3 pieces can take it. The point of Morphy's move is that 2.Qxg6 fails to Nde2 mate.

I was talking earlier in the year to a colleague Frank Meerbach about Morphy. Frank has been showing Morphy games for a long time, and is known to like the great American master. I asked Frank his favourite games and he said:

Paulsen-Morphy USA Ch 1857
Bird-Morphy London (m5) 1858
Opera House Game

There will, of course, be others but these 3 are absolute classics reprinted in many books, including all of them making it into Garry Kasparov's "My Great Predecessor's, Volume 1". It is important to gain something from classics, and there are some similar themes in the Paulsen and Bird games. I'll put the positions up, and then talk about them next time.

Paulsen-Morphy, Black to play

Bird-Morphy, Black to move

Whether you are trying to work out Morphy's combinations for the first time, or whether you are reliving them, enjoy!

Teaching Tactics

It's always fun and rewarding teaching kids tactics, or as I prefer to call them, tricks. Teaching kids the patterns and then seeing their sense of achievement when they employ a tactical operation in one of their games is great. This term I'm showing a load of games and positions from tactical masterpieces, with a particular emphasis on teaching kids to recognise the basic tactical themes of pins, forks, discovered attacks and skewers. Of course, there will be many other things happening in the games, but it is important that young children recognise the basic patterns best of all, with an idea to employ them properly, and defend against them as well.

This week Paul Morphy takes the limelight, so I thought I'd throw some positions on here. I'm not going to be showing every position to the kids that I put up here, there were just too many to choose from.

So, Monday's move...well, actually Morphy played this game blindfold, so maybe I should just put the moves up, and give you all the chance to try to work out Morphy's move, blindfold!

Nah, here's the position with black to play.

Black to play

Answer tomorrow with more Morphy tactics!

Problems

Last post, I left a problem to solve.

White to play and draw

This was composed in 1966, my birth year, by Ukrainian composer Tigran Gorgiev. It's an amusing puzzle with a number of forced moves.

1.Nc7 [Threatens Nb5# so black must make space for his king] 1..Qc1 2.Nb5+ Kb2

All fairly obvious so far. 3.Nd6 [Threatens mate on c4, so again, space must be made for black's king] 3..Qd1 4.Nc4+ Kc1

Again, all has been forced 5.Ne5! [Again mate is threatened, and this one is important as there is only one way to stop mate which blocks black's position even more] 5..Nf2

Well, it's all been forced up to now, but what now? 6.h7 Nh2!

Black's defence involves playing Nhg4 to get rid of white's annoying knight 7.h8=N!! [A fabulous underpromotion. From h8 the new knight will be able to support white's e5 monster] 7..Nhg4

8.Nhg6! [Apparently, 8.Nhf7 would lose to 8..Nf6 when the threat of Nd7+ means that white's king has to move, but it doesn't have a good square, and the black king will eventually get to b2 allowing the c-pawn to promote] 8..Kb2

9.Nc4+ [Closes the door to black's king] 9..Kc1 [Only move] 10.Nge5!

10..Nxe5 [10..b2?? leads to a white win. White takes the a4 pawn with his king and plays Na5-b3 mate] 11.Nxe5

Notice that black can't move the knight or it allows white to play Nd3# So, 11..a3 12.Kb4 and now white has run out of moves, except for 12..Kb2 [12..b2 still leads to a white win Nd7-c5-b3/d3mate]

And now the game must end in a perpetual after 13.Nc4+ Kc1 14.Ne5 Kb2 15.Nc4+ etc

A fun study!

Less fun was an article I saw in the NY Times about the gender gap in chess. I haven't written about this in a while, but it's a problem that keeps surfacing and no one seems to do anything about it. Funnily enough, although there was no Australian Championship in 1966, there was a women's championship with Marion McGrath becoming the first Australian Women's Champion. Not surprisingly in a male dominated game, Ozbase has no record of any games played in this event. But in defence of Ozbase, there are no games of any event in Australia in 1966.

Anyway, the article in the NY Times can be read here.

50 Years Ago Pt 1

This October comes the 50 year milestone in my life. These are the sort of things that get you looking back on things. So I checked Ozbase to see if there were interesting games, or encounters here in Australia in the year of my birth. However, I was very disappointed to see that the great repository of Australian chess games, doesn't have a single entry for 1966. It's like there were no games played in Australia that year.

Well, there wasn't an Australian Championships, and it was before the Australian Open came into being, but there would certainly have been some things happening in Australia on the chess front that year. This is something which needs further investigation....

I mean, 1966 was a vintage year for chess. It was World Championship year, with Petrosian holding off Spassky, it was also Olympiad year (Australia didn't play) with the Soviet Union winning in Havana. The line up of stars at the Olympiad was impressive: Petrosian, Fischer, Spassky, Tal, Larsen, Korchnoi, Portisch, Gligoric all played, but the star of the show was the Spanish genius Pomar who played an amazing game against Sweden's Johansson. Pomar unfortunately died earlier this year, but in chess terms he had an amazing life. Pomar's opponents included Alekhine (one draw), Botvinnik, Fischer (who he drew with), Karpov, Petrosian (draws), Smyslov, Spassky (draws), Tal (draws), and most of the elite of the times. Here's some interesting reading about Pomar, while here is the obituary on the FIDE site.

Pomar-Johansson Havana Olympiad 1966, the fun and games starts in this position. The game had started as a fairly standard Nimzo-Indian, and black has built nice pressure on long diagonal, which Pomar now just gives up 17.Ng5!? Black takes the bait, 17..Bxg2. A pawn's a pawn, and what is white doing anyway??

18.Bxe6!! What a move! White grabs back his pawn, hitting c8 twice! 18..Bxf1 And again, why not? Black threatens mate and the white queen. What is white doing?

19.Qf3!! Unbelievable! A deflection based on a back rank mate theme. White moves his queen from attack, blocks the mate and cranks up the tactical tension a degree higher. 19..Bg2! An X-Ray defence. 20.Qxb7 Bxb7

Amazingly, after white regains his rook, the position will still be materially level, but black has problems developing as white keeps piling on the pressure. 21.Bxc8! Bd5

22.e4!! White just doesn't let up, throwing another pawn on the barbie. 22..Nxe4 23.Nxe4 Bxe4

24.Re1 f5 Black's king has an escape square 25.Be6+ Kh8 No it doesn't

26.Bxf5 winning back the pawn 26..Bc6 27.d5 and black finally resigned as he is definitely going to lose a piece at least. An absolutely fantastic blaze of tactics!

There was also one of the greatest tournaments of all time played in 1966, the double round robin Piatigorsky Cup played in Santa Monica and featuring Spassky, Fischer, Petrosian, Larsen, Najdorf, Portisch, Reshevsky, Unzicker, Donner and Ivkov. Fischer started abysmally, but then had a brilliant second half of the tournament to finish a close second to Spassky.

And finally, a little teaser. It's white to play and draw from this position, composed in 1966!

White to play and draw! Enjoy :)

Chess Near and Far, quick and slow.

Having not played chess for a bit, I've sort of dropped off following the chess scene. However, it is a huge week for chess internationally, and it's time to catch up a bit on what has been happening at the MCC, my local club.

Monday night is FIDE rated chess night at the MCC. The last tournament was the City of Melbourne open which finished with a dramatic last round. FM Domagoj Dragicevic had been leading the tournament by half a point going into the last round, but was held to a draw by junior Ray Yang. This allowed FM and top rated player Greg Canfell to catch Domagoj with a last round win over another junior talent, Tristan Krstevski. With his final round draw, Ray Yang was able to remain in third place equal with Vishal Bhat and Mehmedalija Dizdarevic. Tristan Krstevski's loss still left him in a strong equal 6th with David Cannon. These junior performances are a great boost for the future of chess at the MCC, and hopefully these players can make the transition to the wider Victorian and Australian top level, that previous MCC juniors like Ari Dale and Jack Puccini have done.

With one big tournament gone, another soon takes it place, and this Monday the MCC starts the 7 round Malitis Memorial. I was thinking about playing, but I will give it a miss and observe the happenings. The tournament is following the format of last year. The top 8 players will be arranged into a round robin, and everyone else plays a 7 round swiss system.Current entries confirm that the top section will include IM Mirko Rujevic, and FM Greg Canfell, but the final make up of the event will probably not be known until the actual start night. That can be a tough thing in a round robin, basically turning up without any preparation and then finding our you're playing a very strong opponent. It is the same for everyone, so that even things out, but elite round robins are about putting in top performances which involves preparation, so it feels as if this tournament in a 6 round RR with a single round of random chess.

You can sign up for the Malitis Memorial on the MCC website, or by visiting the club.

The MCC also runs faster time control events, with Allegro (what most people would call Rapid) and Blitz tournaments integrated into the weekly schedule. The Allegro events are run as 7 round 15-0 swiss tournaments and the turn out for these events has consistently been reaching around 40 players recently. There are players of all levels, from newcomers to chess tournaments to Masters, and in fact the last tournament had 2 IM's in the field of 39 players. Allegro tournaments run on Saturday afternoons at 2 pm (best to get there early, or the event starts later) and are a great introduction to chess, and can become addictive.

Personally, I'm more like ex World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik when it comes to fast chess. When interviewed in 1989 he said:

"Yes, I have played a blitz game once. It was on a train, in 1929"

However, I am aware of the vast amount of players who enjoy fast time controls, and the MCC provides for them too! Tuesday night is blitz night, and this is still trying to establish itself like the Allegro. At the moment there are less than 10 players regularly showing up, which is a shame as blitz is a way of sharpening our game, especially when there are some strong players to contend with. The blitz tournaments start around 7 pm on Tuesday nights, and it would be really good if this event could build to about 12-16 regularly playing.

While there is no shortage of chess locally for those willing to make a little effort and get to the club, there is also a mass of chess about to be happening in the international sphere. My favourite place to watch games is the chess24 website, who not only show live games, but have excellent reports about tournaments and chess news. And good news for Australia is that there is a super GM elite event being played in China at a time zone to suit us. The Danzhou event features current world number 9 Diren Ling (and number 1 blitz rated in the world!) along with 8 other players over 2700, and Women's World Champ Yifan Hou. The tournament starts about the same time I will post this blog, at 4.30 pm AEST.

Then we get the following events following in short order:

Dortmund (Kramnik, Caruana, Vachier-Legrave) Saturday 9th
US Junior Ch (Jeffrey Xiong heads an impressive field) Saturday 9th
Benasque Op (8 2600+ players) starts today
Warsaw Op (25 2600+ players) starts tomorrow

And....

Bilboa Masters:

Carlsen, Giri, Nakamura, Karjakin, So and Wei Yi - what a field, what a tournament! Starts next Wednesday, 13th July.

(the busy European summer chess schedule makes things hectic for chess at this time of year. Already in progress are the Women's GP event in Chengdu and the Polugaevsky memorial)

So I guess what I'm saying is that it's a great time to watch, learn and practice your chess! Enjoy

The Sunday After

Labour leader Bill Shorten and sausagegate :D (image from the Telegraph)

After the Lord Mayor's show (literally) which was the British referendum on whether to stay in Europe last week, yesterday Australia had a general election. There are some differences in the UK and Australian voting systems that are important to understand.

1. Voting is compulsory in Australia. I'm not sure this is something I agree with. As preferences have to be put in order, this becomes even more imposing on the voter who has to choose between a certain number of candidates.

2. The UK has a first past the post system, Australia has a form of proportional representation. In theory, a vote for a minor party is important in Australia, though in practice the election has been similar to the UK system with a race between the 2 major parties, and the majority of voters not prepared to vote with their conscience as they believe this to be a wasted vote.

3. Australia has a federal system, while the UK is still a central parliamentary system. The states in Australia have considerable legislative, and budgetry powers which make them semi independent entities. The federal system is composed of 2 houses, the Senate and the Representatives which exercises a balance of power, apparently. The head of state is nominally still the UK monarch, but why I don't know.

4. Australia's economy is good, and it is considered a major economic power in the world, especially our mining industry. In reality, Australia's position seems to rely heavily on economic relations with the superpowers, America and China. Diplomatically, Australia is a minor player on the world stage. This is the opposite of the UK where economic strength is based on finance rather than raw materials, and international relations remain a high priority, even in our post-colonial world.


The biggest difference from my point of view of the UK referendum and the Australian general election seemed to have been the intensity of feeling involved. Now I know the UK referendum was about a single issue, but that issue was connected to almost everything about the way the country runs.The UK referendum was hotly debated, with pomp, anger, mistrust, frustration, and even violence among the emotions involved. The Australian election seems to have been conducted in an almost party spirit, with a relatively low key build up from the combatants. (my letter box got one electioneering pamphlet from our local Liberal candidate, and a guide on how to vote) Twitter was awash with pictures of the Labour leader struggling to eat a sausage at an election barbecue

The aftermath has been remarkably similar, though, with no one being any the wiser to what is going to happen. The UK finds itself in limbo waiting for someone to make a decision as to whether the referendum will be taken as a sign for the British Government to invoke Article 50 and leave the EU. It's over a week and no one seems prepared to push the button. Here in Australia, the vote was inconclusive and we wake up to a non-result. Not only is there no winner, the votes haven't even all been counted, and they won't until Tuesday! So we have until then, and possibly later, to discover who our new government will be, or if there will be a new government, or the need for another election.

Crazily long Senate ballot paper (image from http://voiceaustralia.news/)

Saying that, the ballot papers in this year's election were ridiculous. The senate paper was too long to lay flat in the voting booth, and it wasn't set out in alphabetical order, or any other order that seemed to make sense. It took me quite a while to find my first choice party and then I had to search for the second choice. I guess like many, I wasn't fully aware of all the parties I'd be putting preferences down for, but I knew which main parties to vote for or not. This made it rather cumbersome choosing a 5th and 6th choice at the polling booth, and next time I go to the polls, I'll be going with 6 definite choices.