Teamleague 37 - Round 3 (part 1)

With 3 of our games played so far in this round blackk has put in a workman-like win, while Mejdanblues was not so lucky this week. Mapleleaf plays FM Maras later today, and would have been needing only a draw to win the match for us if I had not made such a botch of my game against dzomba. As it is, Mapleleaf will now need to come out swinging to level up the match score.

So what went wrong? In short, I got the better of the complicated tactics only to make a mess of the simple things. But first to the pre-game preparation.

Our "team intelligence" indicated that dzomba plays the Moller / Arkangel defence to the Ruy Lopez (eco C78), and I spent some time researching that. My conclusion was that it's a very attractive variation for Black, with ... a6, ... b5, and ... Bc5 initiating early counter-attacking possibilities. I might even take it up myself. It's been played quite a bit at the top level over the last 15 years or so and I found games involving the likes of Shirov, Topalov, Short, Adams, even Kramnik. Anand has played it on both sides of the board, and had some good results with the White pieces, so I concentrated on those games.

Immediately before the game, I went through "1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations" for about an hour ('rehearsal'), and then about another hour looking at "The Encyclopaedia of Chess Middle Games". The objective of this was to practice finding tactics in unfamiliar positions, so having warmed up the 'pattern recognition circuits' with 1001, I used ECM to crank up the 'search and calculate algorithm'. This worked quite well, and I'll continue to do it for future games.



I got through the opening reasonably well thanks to Vishy, although I rather suspect I mixed up the myriad of sub-variations. Sometimes White plays h3 preventing ... Bg4 with d4, sometimes h3 is omitted in favour of the more conservative d3. At move 15. ... cxb6 is something of a concession by Black who would naturally rather play Rxb6 but then the discovered attack d5 will be strong. So White has invested a pawn for the two Bishops on an open board and a very active position.

My pawn on c3 is interesting, it looks like a straggler but has a blessed life. It can't be taken with unprotected knights at c3 and c7, and at move 18 Crafty momentarily considers snipping it off before more soberly looking at ... Qc7 and ... Qf6 with about -0.5 to -0.6 advantage to Black.

By move 23 the Black castle is all but unprotected by pieces, and I've forced the first weakening of it's wall. Then, oh dear! blinded by my own tactical geniusity I played 24. Qxe5??. The justification of this move is the game continuation, but I finally noticed I'd left Bb3 en prise about 10 seconds after playing it and nearly thumped at the 'resign' button there and then. Fortunately, it looks like Bxh6 might be a mating attack after ... Nxb3 (actually it isn't even close for so many reasons) and my opponent went for the 'safe' exchange win with ... Nd3 whereupon I breathed a huge sigh of relief and uncorked my combination. Crafty has Black still winning comfortably after 25. ... Kxf7 26. Qf5+ Qf6 (Rh4 is unprotected... oops!) but I got lucky again when he recaptured with the Rook. All-in-all I benefitted from playing some 'weak aggressive' style poker. 24. Bc2 maintains a small plus for White.

Finally, I had seen 37. Bd2 defending the mate-in-1 threat but didn't have the courage to play it. My reasoning was that the pin by say ... Qb2 would be ugly although obviously I can defend the Bishop as often as it's attacked with Queen and Rook. As it happens, Bd2 is wrong because of ... Qa7+ with ... b4 and ... Ba6+ and is actually no better than the move I played in the forlorn hope of making threats with my King-side pawns while rounding up the b-pawn. As you can see, dzomba had the necessary technique to force the pawn home.

It's not the most terrible game I've played, I made a fight of it. I at least found some tactical possibilities, even if they did mostly turn out to be furphys. It's still accuracy of analysis I need the most work on at the moment.

Good luck with the game tonight, Mapleleaf.