The Chess Mind

In this post, I presented Andrew Martin's ChessBase show puzzle.



Since his deadline for entries has passed, it shouldn't do any harm to publish the solution. When you're ready to have a look, click here.

One of the most powerful weapons in chess is the zwischenzug ("in-between move"), but one must be careful about such things. I've had students who were addicted to the device, often forsaking obvious recaptures and retreats in search of something to counterattack. The problem, more often than not, was that the opponent could elude the counter in a way that maintained the original gain (or put yet another of my students' pieces in jeopardy).

I was reminded of this when I came across the very recent game between Markus Stangl and Wolfgang Schwaninger from the Austrian Team Championship. Stangl started attacking things, Schwaninger jumped on the zwischenzug bandwagon and held on for dear life - but not for very long.

Have a look here.

A couple of days ago, I offered two problems:



Black to move.



White to move.

Did you figure them out? When you're ready to the solutions, and the games from which they were taken, click here.

Calling this brilliant is a bit much; in fact, I'm not sure it's even a good move. It is unusual and clever though - have a look.



It's Black to move, and the plan that catches my eye is to try to bring the king in via the light squares, combined with ...b4 to keep White busy on both sides of the board. It looks good to me, but Malakhatko must have felt either that it wouldn't work or that his idea was even better, and came up with the spectacular 31...Qxg3!?

Sacrifices to free up passed pawns are common, but I think this is the first time I've seen this sort of sac: a whole queen is given up, and the net result isn't mate or even a gain of material. In fact, it even loses a pawn. So what's the idea? There are two. First, White's pawn formation is loosened up. Instead of the Black king having to run all the way to g2, aiming at the f-pawn, White's kingside pawns are now very loose, ripe apples waiting to fall from the tree. And second, Black's (new) queen has access to far more squares than her predecessor.

To see what came before, and how this adventure turned out, click here.