Saturday 12 October 2013

Walking into a swinging door

As promised I returned to the London Chess & Bridge Shop, to expand my library. One book I was after seemed to have sold out between visits (serves me right) but I did get a copy of 'Startling Castling!'. Early on in the book it has some examples of opening mistakes/traps that players have fallen into. In fact the traps shown were so good, that there were multiple games from the same positions, after played over a period of 50 years or so.
One example is the following game, first played in 1922. For those with a keen eye for tactics will instantly spot the idea that occurs on move 9, but the question is whether you can make it work all the way to the end. Fortunately for Dr Imbaud the game was played by correspondence, so he had plenty of time to work it out. These days a program like Stockfish can justify the queen sacrifice in around a minute (at least on my slow computer), but it needs to see at least 11 moves (22 ply) before it accepts that it works.


Imbaud - Strumilo [B02]
Cr, 1922



No comments: