The Chess Mind

A month and a half ago I noted the game Thesing-Marin, which repeated a line of the Open Ruy generally condemned on the basis of the 8th game of the 1978 world championship match between Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi. Both games started 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.O-O Nxe4 6.d4 b5 7.Bb3 d5 8.dxe5 Be6 9.Nbd2 Nc5 10.c3 and now 10...g6. Korchnoi was crushed in 28 moves and his 10th move found few followers, but one of them was Korchnoi himself! Still later Marin used it against Thesing, though the large rating disparity should give us pause before declaring the line safe and sound.

In the post linked above, I tried to discern the truth of the matter. My conclusion was that 10...g6 is very risky and probably advantageous for White, but it's at least playable. This update doesn't undermine that conclusion or the novelty devised in that post, but adds to the source material and Black's troubles. The source is the man himself, Viktor Korchnoi, in the updated Olms Edition of Chess is My Life. Click here to see his analysis (it's all his except when preceded by "DM"), with which I'm largely in agreement. The news, then, isn't news at all: Black will continue to struggle in this variation against best play.

In this post of several months ago, I presented the spectacular game Ahn-Ruck.



Here White played 9.a4, a plausible move but a mistake, only to get wiped out with the brilliant 9...Nxe4!!. Along with my sources at the time, I praised Ruck for his brilliant new move. Indeed, it is brilliant, and it's the first time the move has been played in that exact position. If you take a look at Tim Krabbé's latest Open Chess Diary entry (#368), you'll see that it has been played (at least) twice before, but with colors reversed and without a4 (...a5) having been played. Actually, the trap is far more likely to arise in that context, so you might want to have a look.