Some considerable time ago, we had an example of a double seesaw/windmill here, in a game between Oliver Dunne and Pat Fitzsimons.
The theme arises again, and once again in a game of Oliver Dunne’s. This time he’s on the receiving end, in a game against Seán Cummins, from the Heidenfeld a couple of weeks ago.
The diagram shows a critical position, after White’s 19. Bd2-c3.
Cummins – Dunne, Heidenfeld Trophy 2019-20
19… ?
After 19… Be5! 20. Bxd4 Bxg3 the windmill arose, but this time White saw no way of converting it to a win, and after 21. Rg7+ Kh8 22. Rf7+ Kg8 23. Rg7+ Kh8 24 Rf7+ Kg8, the players agreed a draw, on Black’s offer.
Can White do better? White’s best seems to be to recapture with 21. fxg3, when 21… exd3 White uses the windmill to capture the pawns on g5, b7, and a7 and the knight on b6. Though White is then just a single pawn up, engines think it’s clearly winning. Instead 21… Rf7 is a better try, when after 22. Rxe4 the windmill is avoided and material is level, but engines still think White has a decisive advantage.
A report on the Bunratty Masters 2020 has been added to the Tournaments pages here. Nigel Short won for the third time in the past five years; it’s strange to think he had never won before then.
The organisers did an outstanding job in making virtually all games available within days of the event, and 149 out of the 151 games are available, with a long list of Interesting games.
Here is a neat finish from the last round. White has just played 27. Qc3-a5? (instead of something like 27. Rc5=). Black to play and win:
My local club, the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco, has an excellent chess library, with about 2,000 books, along with complete runs of the British Chess Magazine, Informator, New in Chess, and others.
I have meant for some time to read Alexander Baburin’s acclaimed book Winning Pawn Structures (Batsford, 1998), long recognized as a classic but out of print for years. I was pleased to find that the Mechanics’ Institute had a copy, but was surprised and delighted to find that it comes from the author himself, as attested by the inscription:
The celebrated ending of two knights versus a pawn is the hardest of the ‘basic’ endings, and was exhaustively analyzed long before the tablebase era. Interesting though it is, its importance is mostly theoretical, as the ending is very rare in practice. (It’s sometimes given as an example of what the practical player should not study.)
But “very rare” and “never” are two different things, and the ending cropped up yesterday in the Bunratty Challengers.
White – Mirza, Bunratty Challengers 2020
48. … ?
The diagrammed position shows the game at the critical point, a couple of moves before the ending in question appeared. The basic idea is well known: White needs to keep one black pawn on the board to avoid stalemate, and will usually need to blockade it behind the ‘Troitsky line’ e4-f5-g6-h4. Even then, the required winning procedure often runs foul of the 50-move rule.
The usual tablebases (e.g., Nalimov) show that from the diagrammed position Black loses with best play in 97 moves, but this does not account for the 50-move rule.
But the Syzygy tablebases give the information we need. From the diagram, Black has four moves that hold the draw via the 50-move rule: 48… Kc4, 48… Kc6, 48… g5+, and 48… h6. Instead, Diana Mirza played 48… h5?. The ending is so obscure that the ‘?’ is harsh, but this changes the valuation. White could now win via 49. Ng5! (only move), blockading the g-pawn behind the Troitsky line. It’s still a close-run thing: after, say, 49… h4 50. Ne3 h3 51. Kg3 Kc5 52. Kxh3, White mates in 49 moves with best play, with the next pawn move resetting the counter in 44 moves.
As it was, White erred with 49. Kg5?, when it’s a draw even without the 50-move rule. Using = to mean drawn with best play without the 50-move rule, and [=] to mean drawn only because of the rule, the play continued 49… Kc4? [=] (49… h4!, only move, =) 50. Ndf6? (50. Ne3+ [=]; 50. Nf4 [=]) 50… h4=. After 51. Kxh4 White continued, optimistically enough, for another 32 moves.
This is not the first Irish game to reach this ending: Keogh – Bjørgvik, World Senior 65+ Championship 2018 is the only other game in the ICU archive that did so. At all relevant stages that game was won for the two knights if not for the 50-move rule, but drawn once the rule is taken into account.
The Chess Scotland History pages have excellent coverage of many old Scottish tournament series. One such is the Glasgow Congress series that started in the early 1960’s. It included at various times a principal ‘Invitation’ tournament and a Glasgow Junior International.
In 1968, in the seventh of the series, the Glasgow Invitation included one Irish player: Michael Littleton, Irish champion in 1962 (j.) and 1965. The Chess Scotland Game Downloads page has 47 of the 48 games, only added relatively recently (less than a year ago); none of these games is in ChessBase’s Big Database 2017.
The games have been compiled into a (short-form) tournament report here.
Littleton had a relatively disappointing tournament, finishing with 2/6 (+1 =2 -3), to finish 14th out of 16. The event was won by Michael Basman on 5/6, ahead of Craig Pritchett.
The recent Dublin Blitz Championship 2020 (Gonzaga College, February 2) featured a game in which one player had the misfortune to resign in a position where he could force an almost immediate draw by stalemate. Well, these things happen: it’s not always easy to see everything on an increment of two seconds per move.
But there is an interesting puzzle buried within the game, regarding the diagrammed position:
The annual Gonzaga Charity Classic was held last weekend, and it seems to have surpassed all previous versions. There were 201 players across three sections, with 532 games. The very strong Masters section was won by Tarun Kanyamarala via a blitz playoff, after he had finished joint first with GMs Oleg Korneev, Constantin Lupulescu, Sergei Tiviakov, and Matthew Turner.
There were many interesting games, but the highlight has to be the round 1 win by Muhtarim-Ul Haque against Ante Šarić. The diagram shows a critical point, with Haque to move. He chose a daring continuation, but engines indicate that an even more startling move was better. How should White continue from the diagrammed position, and what should be the evaluation be with best play?
The Williamson Shield was held last weekend at Stormont, featuring 33 players over two sections. Gareth Annesley won the main event with 5/5. A full report has been added to the archives here.
