Friday 10 October 2014

You still have to break in

The diagrammed position came from a game at the ANU Chess Club last Wednesday night. The material imbalance cam about bt Black sacrificing a bishop in the hope of setting up some sort of barrier across the centre of the pawns. The alternative had been to lose all the queenside pawns to a marauding rook, which didn't appeal to black at all.
Unfortunately for Black this inventive idea had one weakness, the a5 square. As long as Black could not safely play b6, the White king can march across the board and either come in on b6 or play b6 himself, and lay siege to the b pawn. This is in fact what happened, although the winning plan did take around 20 moves to be completed, but even at 10 seconds a move, it was easy to play. For most of the time the Black king shuffled between a8 and b8 before a well timed Bc6 (with the White knight on a5, the Black king on b8 and the Black bishop on e7, brought the game to its inevitable conclusion.

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