The Chess Mind

Caro-Kann players have to be a hardy lot. There are quite a few aggressive schemes against it, and a moment's carelessness can get even a player slaughtered in 25 moves or less. (Just ask Larsen, Hort, Tal, Timman, Speelman, Akopian, Dreev, Shirov, Karpov and Kasparov!) One must be alert. Once one has survived White's early initiative, however, any result is possible. In fact, there are a number of lines in the Caro-Kann where the long term prospects tend to favor Black, and that makes this opening an attractive choice to players with good technique.

One such player is Alexey Dreev. A great player who occasionally pops into the Linares group, Dreev is an outstanding technician, and he has used the Caro-Kann to good effect throughout his career. As an example, we'll have a look at his game with Konstantin Lerner from the Rostov-on-Don Open in 1993. Lerner played 1.c4 c6 2.e4 (transposing to the C-K) d5 3.exd5 cxd5 4.cxd5 Nf6 5.Bb5+ and held on to the pawn, eventually ceding the bishop pair to do so. When we take a superficial glance at the position after, say, Black's 15th move, we might think that Black's compensation isn't anything special.

When we take a deeper look, however, we'll see that Black's compensation is substantial. Dreev's technique is so powerful and logical that we're likely to do an about-face and wonder if White could have saved himself in the queenless middlegame. We'll examine this game in depth, because most of us could stand to improve our technique, and analyzing the games of players who excel in that area is a great way to improve.

So if you're a player whose technique could be just a little better, you could do a lot worse than to join us tomorrow night - Wednesday night - at 9 p.m. ET. The show is free, and you can find directions for tuning in right here.

I don't intend to jinx Gata Kamsky (not that I believe in such things), who has made it to the finals of the World Cup, where he'll face Alexei Shirov, but in this week's ChessBase show we'll take a look at one of the games from his 1996 world championship match with Anatoly Karpov. Kamsky lost the game we'll examine - game 6 - and the match as well, but the contest remained in a very close, dynamic balance until just before the end.

One of the marks of high-level chess that's generally absent from the game played by the rest of us is the competitors' ability to sustain the tension for a long period of time. In amateur chess, if one side finds a good idea or two, perhaps an attacking plan, a subtle tactical trick, or a strategic idea, the game is won. Their games generally aren't won by virtue of having super-GM-sized ideas, but by their ability to keep finding new ideas while stopping those of their opponents for hour after hour after hour.

And few players have been stronger in this respect than Karpov and Kamsky. It has made their chess somewhat less accessible (or rather, less seemingly accessible) than players like Kasparov, Topalov and Anand, but if we're willing to apply a little elbow grease, we can appreciate and learn from their play, too.

So that's what we'll do this week, Wednesday night at 9 p.m. ET. We'll take this game apart, move by move, piece by piece, until we understand every bit of it. We'll see how both players keep the game tense and dynamic, until finally Kamsky stumbles and Karpov pounces. Maybe Karpov was objectively stronger than Kamsky, but where he had his big edge was in his extra experience. For all Kamsky's experience, patience, and strong nerves, this was his first time playing for the title, while it was Karpov's ninth - tenth if you count the 1974 match with Korchnoi!

In sum, the game was fascinating both for the chess and the psychology, so I hope to have encouraged you to attend tomorrow night. The show is free, as always, and you can find instructions for tuning in, here.

The last few weeks have seen us take a critical look at double king pawn openings where Black plays an early ...f7-f5, and the results haven't been pretty. This week we take aim at the granddaddy of f-pawn pushes in the Open Game, the King's Gambit. It's a wonderfully entertaining opening with a great history, but its soundness has certainly come into question the past few decades.

To claim that it's completely busted would be an overstatement, but it's not for want of trying. The most famous pronouncement of the KG's death came in 1961, when in the wake of his 1960 KG loss to Boris Spassky (though from a won position!), Bobby Fischer proclaimed that he had refuted it with 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Nf3 d6! Fischer never got the chance to try his refutation - in fact, he subsequently played the King's Gambit on several occasions, but with 3.Bc4 - but another world class grandmaster did, with great results.

That player is Yugoslav legend Svetozar Gligoric, a 3-time candidate and elite grandmaster for more than 30 years. Gligoric's resume as a player, theoretician, writer and even as an arbiter places him as one of the great figures of chess in the 20th century. (A rigorous proof: Kasparov devotes a mini-chapter to him in part III of My Great Predecessors. QED.)

Putting it all together, we'll look at Gligoric's two deliriously successful outings with Fischer's "bust" of the King's Gambit: his 27-move win over Albin Planinec (a remarkable player in his own right) and his even faster win over Ricardo Calvo; both games played in 1977. They're entertaining, of theoretical interest, and they remind us that there is no guarantee that White will have all the fun in the King's Gambit!

I look forward to seeing all you later today (Wednesday, at 9 p.m. ET; early Thursday for those of you "across the pond" in Europe); if you need directions for watching the show (free, as always), have a look here.