The Chess Mind

Dutch great Jan Timman is having a really, really bad time in the national championships, but in round 6, today, he found a measure of redemption in his game with Jan Smeets. The Perenyi Variation (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Be3 e6 7.g4 e5 8.Nf5 g6 9.g5) is one of the most entertaining variations in chess - at least for fans! - and it looks like Timman has found a very interesting new idea. It worked like gangbusters in the game, but I'm not sure what Timman had in mind if Black would have played 15...Kd8.

Have a look, and if you work it out, let me know!

Addendum: Chess Today issue 2055 just came in the (e)mail, and they chose to cover this game as well. No news there about 15...Kd8 - IM Maxim Notkin gives the same line I did, but stops even sooner, after 19...Kc7, "with double-edged play". What is new is that 15.Rhe1+ Kd8 transposed into the game S. Farago-Habibi, Budapest 1994, when Black failed to play 17...Qxh2 and was gradually overwhelmed, first by White's kingside passers, and then by a whole new set of passed pawns on the queenside.

I generally managed to engineer my games in such a way that standard reactions are inadequate. (Comment to his 9th move in the game Kasparov-Kamsky, Linares 1993, cited in Igor Stohl, Garry Kasparov's Greatest Chess Games, vol. 1 (Gambit, 2005), p. 307.)

Many of us don't bother looking for novelties, but simply do the best we can to arrange our repertories in accordance with the most optimistic evaluation we can find in modern theory. Others of us, more ambitious, do try to find new moves, either by means of switching on Fritz or his cousins, or by looking at different ways of implementing our preferred plan.

Kasparov's idea is different, though it doesn't exclude either of the means given in the previous sentence. It's akin to a prophylactic approach, but with a twist. The standard sort of preventive approach stops the opponent's idea before it can take shape, but Kasparov's tweak is to allow the opponent to execute his idea (e.g. a routine development scheme or typical middlegame plan) and then show it leads to serious, hard-to-foresee trouble. (A classic example, as Stohl notes on that same page, is Kasparov's fantastic win over Karpov in game 16 of their 1985 match.)

We might not be Kasparovs (and I use that "might" rhetorically), but we can learn from his approach. Sometimes the first step to finding a great idea is knowing what questions to ask, and Kasparov has added a valuable question to our toolkit. Let's use it!

Meanwhile, click here to see the two games mentioned above, with brief notes highlighting the way they exemplify the technique we've discussed.