Round 6 of the 1975 Irish championship paired Oisín McGuinness and Alan Ludgate, each on 3½/5 and just half a point off the lead. The following position was reached after White’s 24. Nce4.
Black to play
Play continued 24… Nd2 25. Nxd2 Qxd2 26. Rxf5? (but White is much worse after 26. Rfe1 also) 26… gxf5 27. Qxh5 Qxd4+ and White’s attack had petered out.
But Tony Doyle has now contributed new analysis, showing that actually White is winning in the diagrammed position. After 24… Nd2, 25. Nf6+ Kg7 26. Nxh5+ gxh5 27. Nxf7! is a win in all lines, e.g., 27… Ne4 28. Qxh5 Qd2 29. Nh6+ Kf6 30. Ng8+! and mate in two moves.
‘Nor does Black have a draw by first playing 24… Bxe4 25. Nxe4 Nd2. White wins with 26. Qe1 Nc4 27. Qg3!, with the threat of Rfxf7: if then 27… Kg7 28. Qh4 (threatening Qf6+, followed by Ng5 and Ne6). In short, Black is completely lost in the position at move 24.’
[Click to play through the full game.]
So there was a win; but it was quite missable, to say the least. It’s therefore worth pointing out that the opportunity and analysis above were all found by Tony without any engine analysis. (Though engines confirm it all.) ‘I could have saved myself a couple of hours by initially entering the position at move 24 into Komodo, but where’s the fun in that? It was this kind of analysis that I used to love when playing CC.’ Yes, indeed.
I hadn’t visited IRLChess in a while and was gobsmacked to see a game of mine from 1975 posted!!
Much thanks to Alan for supplying his game(s) from ’75 (Alan, I really appreciate seeing your analysis in the link) and Tony for the analysis in the posting (Hi to both!).
All I can tell from my scoresheet (Sean: still owe you some sheets from ’74 etc), which I didn’t annotate afterwards (sometime I did) is that I spent 10 minutes thinking about 25 Nxd2 and then bashed out moves 26 and 27 pretty immediately following. At this point I don’t recall any other thoughts about the game. (I also didn’t recall seeing a game of mine in the Chess report from 1975; thanks for that pointer too, the loss to Paul Delaney—I played so many games against Tony and Paul in those years. Must tabulate sometime… )