Jon Speelman: A few patterns

A beautiful clean style

[Note that Jon Speelman also looks at the content of the article in video format, here embedded at the end of the article.]

Firstly, I must add my voice to those mourning Boris Spassky. I didn't know him very well, but he was always very pleasant both at the board and analysing afterwards, and we played five games - one win for him and four draws.

A natural player in the line of Capablanca, Karpov and later Anand, Spassky had a beautiful clean style which somehow led to his pieces being on excellent squares but underlaid by considerable aggression when he got to attack.

I'm not going to annotate a game here in detail, but I am recycling one with an astounding move in which he sacrificed a whole knight for just a pawn against Yuri Averbakh to change the course of the battle - and also recycling the note to that move. One of the most amazing moves of all time, it showed great fighting spirit and his extreme positional sensibility, whereby he understood that proceeding normally would almost certainly have led to him being squashed and therefore punted the alternative.

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Sound proto-problems

I'm starting this time with a couple of problems which I composed last week to illustrate somewhat unusual aspects of a geometrical theme. I don't make any great claims for them - when you see what real problem composers can do, they are very slight - but they do illustrate how easy it is today with the help of modern software to create proto-problems which are at least sound.

As a codger, I prefer baths to showers and, on both Thursday and Friday, I had an idea in the bath. After getting out and turning on ChessBase and an engine, it didn't take more than half an hour to get a sound version of each - and, of course, for short direct mates you don't even need special software, just a normal engine is fine.

Both feature Novotnys, a geometrical theme whereby a piece is placed on the intersection of two lines in order to force one of two defensive pieces to interfere with the other. You can find the full solutions in the pgn file.

The first is unusual in that both pieces interfered with our working on diagonals - the most common instance involves a rook and bishop. And the key is 1.Ne4!, placing the knight on the intersection of a8-h1 and f5-b1. Meanwhile, in the second, two Novotnys in a row are necessary: 1.Nb7! Rcb7 2.Nd5!.

I meet chess players about once a month for lunch in central London, and took these two problems along. With some excellent googling, Matt Read, who is inter alia the manager of the Chess and Bridge shop on Baker Street, found a triple Novotny: a truly magnificent problem.

Given that it is a triple Novotny, you might try to solve this.

The Novotny is named after the Czech composer and lawyer Antonin Novotny (1827-71), who used it in a problem in 1854, though in fact it had been premiered three years earlier by Englishman Henry Turton (1832-81).

However, the problem was thought to be "clumsy" so didn't receive the attention it should have done. It took a little work to track it down, which I eventually did at The Problemist.

While the Novotny tends to be a problem theme, it also appears in studies, and rarely but beautifully over the board. I was actually launched on this column by an example given recently on another site where, as often happens, a Novotny was missed.

If you look at the Wikipedia article on Novotnys it has a number of examples (including mention of Henry Turton's invention but not the actual problem). Another famous instance, though also missed at the time, was by the Swedish grandmaster Emanuel Berg.

I was first introduced to Novotnys through studies, and one of the greatest of them - which I've definitely given here before - was by the great late Pal Benko. Given the theme, it perhaps looks rather obvious, but in fact first White has to manoeuvre first before playing the deadly Novotny.

Select an entry from the list to switch between games

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Links

• Previous column: Reasonable doubt
• All Speelman's Agony columns