A friend of mine witnessed this game and presented it at our chess club this weekend. White is a 2600+ GM, Black a FM.

Black had managed to get a better position. At this point, White had about 3 minutes left, Black about 5 minutes.

White now played 29. Nf3-e5.



I think this is a very good and interesting position to train your calculating abilities.

You are Black to move; what do you do? It is not enough to find a move. This is a very concrete position and you have to calculate the lines to the end.

Very messy position. Some thoughts

Pretty much everything is said so I continue without spoiler tags:

Yes, those are basically all the lines. Line 3 with the exchanges on f1 is probably best. Black then will be a pawn up in the (probably drawn) endgame, but he still has the advantage and can torture White a little. [Actually, when I calculated this I missed 5...Qf2 and thus dismissed the whole line.]

In the game Black played Qxd4 and thought he was winning. White immediately played Qxf4 Qxf4 Nxg4. According to my friend who watched the players Black still was convinced to be winning before Nxg4 was played, but in fact Qxd4 is just a blunder. White had seen all that before he played Ne5, quite impressive with 3 minutes for 11 moves.

I just liked the position because of its symmetry. Black thinks he is exploiting the White back rank, but actually his own back rank is even weaker.

oh yeah *pelvic thrusts*

Looking at the diagram I would have lost in the same way as Qxd4 with the idea of taking on c4 or e5 was the only line I calculated. Unfortunately it simply isn't "forced" enough.

The question is if black should have smelled the rat. Qxd4 is the most obvious move in the position, so why does the 2600 GM give you the opportunity to play it? There must be a refutation and there was. Taking things for granted like that should not be the way to approach a position, but at this critical stage of the game black should have considered every possible reply and he would have found it.

To be fair, he did only have 5 minutes (dunno how many moves to time control). I think he did the right thing when he stuck to his guns and played Qxd4 instead of going with the good old "he must have seen this". I've seen many good positions go down the drain due to that line of thinking. Usually they haven't seen "it" either.