A Correspondence Exchange Sacrifice

Expanding on Petrosian's Exchange Sacrifice, the positional exchange sacrifice has been honed into a routine weapon since Petrosian's heyday, 40-50 years ago. I ran into a nice example yesterday.

Marc Geenen is an ICCF GM who qualified for the 22nd ICCF World Championship by winning a strong candidate section. He annotated the following game from that event in L'Echiquier Belge, October 2007. In the diagrammed position White has just sacrificed a Pawn. Geenen noted:

White obtains compensation since it is not easy for me to develop the Queenside. Since we are approaching the endgame, White has just decided to centralize the King in order to join the Rooks. Considering the continuation of the game, it was probably preferable to castle. How to liberate the Black Queenside? Certainly 16...Na6 is possible, but permits 17.Bxa6 bxa6 18.Nc5, while 16...Nd7 17.Bd5 does not solve all of the problems.

16...b6!.

I was particularly satisfied with my solution, even more because it wasn't suggested by any analysis engine. At first glance impossible, the move is a prelude to an excellent positional sacrifice.

The possibility of 17.Bd5 makes the text look like a blunder.

ICCF CT XXIV/1
Geenen, Marc

Barnsley, Tony
(After 16.Ke1-e2)
[FEN "rnb2rk1/ppB1ppbp/6p1/7n/2B1N3/4P3/P2NKPPP/1R5R b - - 0 16"]

The game continued 17.Bd5 Ba6+ 18.Kf3. Geenen: 'Forced, because 18.Kd1 can be answered with 18...Nc6 19.Bxc6 Rac8. 18...Nd7. Geenen: 'More convincing than 18...Nc6?! 19.Rhc1 Rac8 20.Rxc6 Bb7 21.Rbc1 which leads to enormous complications.'

19.Bxa8 Rxa8 20.g4 Geenen: 'Other moves leave the White King without a safe haven.' 20...f5 21.gxh5 fxe4+ 22.Kg2 gxh5. Geenen summed up the position this way:

Now Black has the advantage. There are not only two Pawns for the exchange, but also several very strong pieces. In particular there is an excellent Bishop pair that assures positional domination, as demonstrated by the following moves.

The game continued 23.Nb3 Rc8 24.Rbc1 Bb2 25.Rc2 Ba3 26.Nd4 Nc5 27.Bg3 Bd3 28.Rd2 Kf7, and Black won in 59 moves.

Biographical Data for Soviet Players

I have only a short note to write today. I looked at the first few names on my database of Soviet Players, compared them to a few of my sources at hand, and checked the results.

I counted:-
50 names starting with 'A' or 'B' (e.g. Alekhine & Botvinnik), and found
46 listed in 'Chess Personalia' by Gaige,
42 listed in the Chessgames.com: Chess Player Directory, and
23 listed in 'The Oxford Companion to Chess' by Hooper and Whyld.

All 50 names are listed in at least one reference. That's an encouraging start!

Alekhine BBC Interview

This 'video' is a radio interview set to a few photos, mainly of the fourth World Champion.

Alekhine Interview (4:25) • BBC 1938

The introduction is by Hanon Russell of ChessCafe.com, where you should be able to find a transcript of the interview buried inside a PDF document.

An Obvious Positional Advantage

Continuing with Petrosian's Exchange Sacrifice, Petrosian evaluated the position shown in the diagram with 'White has an obvious positional advantage'.

Black has a backward Pawn e7, White the strong Knight on c6. The usual method for White is pressure by Rooks along the e-file to force ...e6. After the exchange on e6 Black has new troubles. Without hurry, through positional transformations, White increases his positional plus. The natural order of moves would be Re1 followed by Bf4 or Bg5, depending on Black's reaction, so as to exercise a lasting pressure which could grow step by step.

Instead, Portisch played 24.Bg5.

Now Black could have played 24...Bf6, 24...Nf6, or even 24...Nb8, protecting the attacked Pawn. The move Black cannot dream about is ...f6. But after White's inaccuracy, the idea of ....e5 fascinated me. If White takes en passant, Black can hold the position: he recaptures with the Rook, has the strong Bishop g7, another Rook goes to e8, and the Knights are good.

Petrosian trusted his intuition and played 24...e5.

Portisch thought some ten minutes, looking at me all the time. He couldn't decide whether I had sacrificed an exchange or blundered it away. Finally, after the game, he said he had decided that it was a blunder. Therefore he took the exchange and got a bad position.

How many players wouldn't have taken the exchange?

San Antonio 1972
Petrosian, Tigran

Portisch, Lajos
(After 23...Ne4-c5)
[FEN "4rrk1/1bqnppbp/1pNp2p1/pPnP4/2P5/4BB2/P4PPP/1NRQ1RK1 w - - 0 24"]

The game continued 25.Be7 f5 26.Bxf8 Nxf8.

The position has been changed radically in two moves. White has a Rook for a minor piece but no active play: all the files are closed, while Rooks are valuable only when they operate on open lines. The Black Pawn stands on e5, not e7, so the White Knight is very beautiful, but nothing else. Situations might arise where Black could have an extra piece in action. Unfortunately I failed to win this game, although Black undoubtedly had the edge.

[To be continued]

To play through the complete game see...

Lajos Portisch vs Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian, San Antonio 1972
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1106952

...on Chessgames.com.

Chess Product Odds & Ends

While working on my chess links for About Chess, I always have a few interesting links that, for some reason, aren't quite suitable for the published lists. This month's topic was Resources for Chess Products and Shopping, and these were my leftover links:

• Home > Buy > Search: chess Selling Leads • www.alibaba.com • Import/export anyone?
  
  
• Chess Mould kits by Prince August • www.princeaugust.ie • Make your own theme chess set?
  
  
• Museum of Chess Programs • www.gambitchess.com • Download the executables.
  
  
• ChessTheatre • www.dgtprojects.com • DGT sells good products, but this one's a mystery; whatever, it's free.
  
  
• Russian Chess : Handcrafted by Russian Artists in St. Petersburg • wanspages.prodigy.net • One of a kind sets, many of them already sold.

I especially liked browsing the Alibaba.com offerings.

Soviet Players

As I mentioned in my post on The Soviet School, I would like to concentrate more on the players than on the events, which have been well covered elsewhere. I decided that a good place to start was by identifying the most important players.

Analyzing my PGN file on the 58 Soviet Championships, with results mainly from the finals, I came up with the names of 304 different players who have competed in at least one event. While I'm not certain that this is complete or error free, it's a good start. It at least gives me several hundred names that I don't have to retype.

I compared this list with the names referenced in Kotov and Yudovich's book. The bulk of the book, called Part Two, has chapters on grandmasters (with sections of varying length on 19 players: Botvinnik, Smyslov, etc.), prominent masters (24 players: Alatortsev, Aronin, etc.), and women players (8 players: Bykova, Rubtsova, etc.).

Part One is an introduction to the Soviet School. It has full chapters on Chigorin and Alekhine, along with sections on other prominent masters -- Petrov, Grigoriev, and Ryumin to name a few -- who were deceased when the book was written in 1958. I counted 17 players, and added Bogolyubov, who is mentioned only in passing. He had not yet been 'rehabilitated' at the time of writing, but is nevertheless an important player who participated in two early championships.

At the end of the book is an appendix with the same 19 grandmasters and a fuller list of 110 masters, many of them unknown to me previously. The masters repeat the names of the 32 men and women mentioned earlier in the book, although one appears to have been misidentified in the appendix ('Sokolovsky' instead of 'Sokolsky'). Merging these names with those from the Soviet Championships gave me a list of 359 players for further investigation.

The Soviet lists of grandmasters and masters are *not* the same as those based on the FIDE titles. I wasn't able to pin down the exact criteria for awarding titles, which will have to wait for another day.

Women players, as usual, present special challenges. I don't have a good reference for Soviet Women's Championships and I'm not certain that one exists. I'll see what I can do as the project evolves.

Next step: Gather basic biographical data from various sources.

Mongols, Russia, and Strobeck

While gathering various references on Soviet chess, I recorded the summary of a relevant chapter in Murray's 'History of Chess' (1913, 1962), p.366.

Chapter XVIII - Chess in Central and Northern Asia, and in Russia : Unclassified Varieties; Nomenclature; References to chess as played by the Tibetans, Mongols, and other Siberian races; Probable origin of the game; Chess in Turkestan, Armenia, and Georgia; The older chess of Russia; Its ancestry; Nomenclature; History; Pieces; Possible traces of Asiatic influence further West; Ströbeck [Stroebeck, Strobeck]; Conclusions

The mention of Strobeck, located in Germany and often called 'the chess village', caught my immediate attention. It was the subject of a YouTube video -- Strobeck -- recently featured on this blog. What is the connection between Strobeck and chess in Russia? A section in Murray titled 'Possible traces of Mongol chess in Central Europe' (p.388) provided more information.

Certain peculiarities of play that began soon after 1600 to appear in chess as played in different regions of the great Central Plain of Europe are identical with some of the special features that exist in Russian chess, or in the Asiatic games decribed in this chapter. These peculiarities of rule have generally been held to be due to an undercurrent of Mongol or Asiatic influences that was travelling westwards during the Middle Ages.

The rules were:

• Both players can make two moves on the first turn.
  
• Attack on the Queen should be announced.
  
• A stalemated player wins the game (yes, wins!).

After describing some of the variations on these rules, Murray continued

Another variety of chess, exhibiting some of the special features just described, has long been associated with the village of Strobeck near Halberstadt in the Harz Mountains, which has been noted since the beginning of the 17th cent. for that fact that chess has maintained an extraordinary popularity among all classes of its inhabitants.

Murray then described other chess rules peculiar to Strobeck and summarized

The hypothesis that these German varieties of chess represent the western limit of a migration by way of Central Asia has this in it favour, that it enables us to to arrange the story so as to show an orderly and self-consistent development. [...] We are really thrown back upon the argument that the mathematical chances are so great against two peoples developing the same varieties of rule, that the existence of common rules must presuppose a relationship between the games in which they occur.

He discussed briefly the possibility that the Russian and Mongol rules were adapted as European rules moved eastward, but concluded, 'I am inclined to think that the other view is the more probable, and that these peculiarities of rule are of Eastern origin.' Murray's 'History' is difficult to read in sequence from the first page to the last, but his detailed treatment of hundreds of small subjects like Strobeck is always a fountain of obscure information.

***

Note: One of a half-dozen posts in Chess Carnival IV: December Edition. I don't think this idea is going to survive much longer. I wonder what the problem is. • In Carnival Reaction, J.C. Hallman, author of 'The Chess Artist', had a comment on the subject of my post.