The Chess Mind

One of the best and most enjoyable ways to work on one's tactics is by solving endgame studies, for at least three reasons. First and most obviously, we're using our mental muscles. Second, it helps develop our fantasy - our imagination. Sometimes tactics work in a stock way, as if taken from the pages of our basic exercise books, but not usually. (After all, our opponents know those books, too.) Third, it gets us into the habit of looking for our opponent's resources, as just about every study worth its salt will have at least one misleading try.

With this encouragement, have a look at this position:


Wotawa 1960; White to move and win

The solution will be given in a few days. A reminder: please don't comment proposed solutions. (I've blocked them from this post, but please don't leave them somewhere else.)

I was leafing through Alexander Kotov's Play Like a Grandmaster the other day, and in the section "Chessboard Drama" of chapter 3 ("Combinational Vision") he presented a number of studies, including these two:


Kazantsev 1964; White to move and win


Composer? Kotov doesn't say (and doesn't take credit) and it's not in the Study Database. White wins.

The first is a reasonable study, but cooked (there are multiple White wins), while the second is completely ridiculous (White has mate in one or two at every point in the study), but both conclude with fantastic final positions. Try to solve the first one, looking first for logical ideas (for the sorts of moves that look like they'd be intended by a composer), but don't even bother with the second. The real fun in both cases is in the seeing more than in the solving, and you can find the composers' intended solutions here.

A few days ago, when reporting on the rapid chess event in Villandry (won by GM Laurent Fressinet), I mentioned that his one loss in the final to GM Alexandra Kosteniuk was a 237-mover. I didn't see the game anywhere, but reader Rob Eisler kindly wrote in with the score, which he found on Tim Krabbé's excellent Open Chess Diary.

It has to be said that the game was quite strange. After 78 moves, Kosteniuk had a rook and bishop against Fressinet's rook and pawn, and on move 121 she managed to win the pawn. Rook and bishop vs. rook is hard to defend in a rapid game, but at least one only has to defend it for 50 moves. Right? Apparently not. Fressinet defended very well for a long time, mostly by means of the second-rank defense, but around the late 210s he started losing the thread. He wasn't able to set up the second-rank defense and didn't set up the Cochrane defense either. Without having either of those techniques handy, it's just about impossible for anyone but a computer to play it right, and on move 228 Fressinet's position was lost. Kosteniuk quickly set up a Philidor-like position, though she erred on move 233. Two moves later Fressinet returned the favor, and then Kosteniuk played the right moves. After her 237th move, Fressinet either had to sac his rook for her bishop or get mated in no more than two moves.

Or...he could have declared a draw. Could he have really forgotten about the 50-move rule? As the game was a rapid one, they probably weren't writing down the moves, but surely there's some mechanism by which a player can be protected from this sort of endless torture. Unless the fault is wholly Fressinet's for never declaring a draw, it's a minor outrage that FIDE's rules allow this sort of thing to happen. Does anyone know what the rapid rules are, and/or what actually happened in the event?

Here's the game, with some comments on a few crucial moments in the rook and bishop vs. rook ending.