The superfluous piece, tactics edition
When many of hear or read the phrase "the superfluous piece" - especially "the superfluous knight", we think about über-trainers Mark Dvoretsky and Artur Yusupov and their discussion of positions like this:
This position is from the game Zukertort-Blackburne, London 1883. Zukertort went on to win in spectacular fashion, but his decision to play 13.f3 here was a small inaccuracy. The point here is that Black's knights are doing the job of one, as they are competing for the same squares rather than complementing each other. One knight is thus superfluous. White's best move, therefore, as Yusupov points out in Secrets of Chess Training (p. 68), was the paradoxical 13.Nb1!, avoid the exchange and threatening f3 followed by Nc3 and a well-timed e4.
That's the sort of "superfluous piece" we're more familiar with, but there are other ways in which a piece can be just so much excess baggage. In the latest issue of New in Chess Magazine (2008/6), Grandmaster of endgame composition Oleg Pervakov has a wonderful article entitled "Superfluous pieces and how to jettison them (Part 1)." He starts the article with some real-game examples to illustrate the concept, but I think it will be best for our purposes to start with the first (and easiest) study he provides:
D. Gurgenidze 1988
White to play and win.
(You may wish to try to solve this on your own; when you're ready to read on, click below.)
This position is from the game Zukertort-Blackburne, London 1883. Zukertort went on to win in spectacular fashion, but his decision to play 13.f3 here was a small inaccuracy. The point here is that Black's knights are doing the job of one, as they are competing for the same squares rather than complementing each other. One knight is thus superfluous. White's best move, therefore, as Yusupov points out in Secrets of Chess Training (p. 68), was the paradoxical 13.Nb1!, avoid the exchange and threatening f3 followed by Nc3 and a well-timed e4.
That's the sort of "superfluous piece" we're more familiar with, but there are other ways in which a piece can be just so much excess baggage. In the latest issue of New in Chess Magazine (2008/6), Grandmaster of endgame composition Oleg Pervakov has a wonderful article entitled "Superfluous pieces and how to jettison them (Part 1)." He starts the article with some real-game examples to illustrate the concept, but I think it will be best for our purposes to start with the first (and easiest) study he provides:
D. Gurgenidze 1988
White to play and win.
(You may wish to try to solve this on your own; when you're ready to read on, click below.)
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