Changing the narrative

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

During a complicated battle, it's far from unusual for the opponent to offer you material, and one of my strengths as a player is that my reaction then is often not to take the bait but to see if I can disrupt the opponent's narrative by playing something else.

Of course, there are times when you should or must take the sacrifice. If a bomb arrives in the middle of your position, then you'll probably have to accede to the inevitable and sometimes a sacrifice looks so dodgy that you really should think about accepting it, but often it really is better either to refuse the material entirely or to defer capture until you choose the circumstances.

In general, when calculating, you mustn't take anything for granted. Surely everybody sees variations in terms of moves played and answered but sometimes the answers while "obvious" will be wrong and this month I'm looking at several examples starting with one of my favourite finishes from my own games.

A beautiful finish

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I had just played ...h6 to induce the sacrifice. In fact, my engine doesn't think that Black has much of an advantage after simply 19.Bxf6 Bxf6, but it looked very pleasant to me, and I wasn't at all surprised when he did let rip. However the computers go ping and recommend a move which didn't either of our heads thought about during the game - 19.Rd7! Nxd7 20.Bxe7 and that would have been about equal.

19.Bxh6 gxh6 20.Qxh6 Be4

Definitely not 20...Ne4? 21.Re1, but in fact my engine prefers 20...Rh5 21.Rg4+ Nxg4 22.Qxh5 Bxf3 23.Bxf3 Nf6 24.Qg5+ Kh7

21.Ng5 Ng4

The bishop's temporary post on e4 prevents mate.

22.Qh4 Rxg5 23.Bxe4 f5 24.Rd7

White's threats are serious, but Black is now able to get in first by ignoring the attack on the bishop (I guess that this isn't a great example of our theme, but it is pretty).

24...Nxf2

Of course this is what Black wants to play but it's only today, 19 years later, that the engine has told me that ...Qc5 is possible because if then 25.b4 there is 25...Rg7!

25.Bf3

25.Rxe7 Nxe4+ 26.Kg2 Rg7 and Black wins easily.

Can you now see the finish?

(Click "show" below to see the line and play it out on the dynamic diagram above - or find the whole game analysed in the pgn replayer at the end of the article).

25...Ne4+ 26.Kh1 Rxg3 27.Qxe7 Qg1+ 28.Rxg1 Nf2# My opponent sportingly let me play it out to checkmate. I think it's the only time in my career that I've delivered a smothered mate in a classical game.

When my hand is not working...

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After this very positive moment I'm telling a story against myself. It comes a couple of weeks ago from the Golders Green qualifier for this year's UK Open Blitz Championship, which is actually held in a church about 10 minutes walk from my home. I played two times, previously qualifying by coming second and even won the final a few years ago.

This time I was a bit miffed that they doubled the number of qualifiers and reduced the spots for each to just one, though actually the top two finishers in Golders Green - Shreyas Royal and Stanley Badacsonyi - had already both qualified elsewhere, so third placed Lorin D'Costa took the one qualifying spot.

In any case, blitz is very much a question of the moment and for me depends totally on whether "my hand is working". This time it decidedly wasn't, and I lost 4 games out of the 15: to Shreyas, which is fair enough; to Malcolm Pein's son Jonathan, a guy against whom I blundered a rook in a totally winning position; and this one, which I really found quite funny even at the time.

Here I came up with the stunningly brilliant idea of 25.c4

The move number is approximate, as I know the exact position but haven't bothered to reconstruct the whole game (which began as a Smyslov King's Indian).

25...Bxd6 26.cxd5?? Re1+!

Here I was unable to prevent myself from swearing aloud - not of course at my opponent but at my own glorious stupidity. It really was rather wonderful to construct a helpmate for my opponent.0–1

A shocking sequence

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I remembered this example from one of my favourite books when I was young - the work on the middlegame by Max Euwe and Haije Kramer. This originally appeared as a series of pamphlets in Dutch and was later published by G Bell and Sons Ltd in English (in English descriptive notation of course) in two volumes. The diagram comes from volume 2 in a section on "Familiar failings" regarding "Eagerness to exchange pieces". It could equally come under my heading here as an example of making an assumption without thinking.

The game is from the great Candidates Tournament of Zurich 1953, and it was round 19 of 30 so you can forgive the players for having somewhat addled brains. I managed to find David Bronstein's wonderful book on the tournament (it was in a pile rather where it should have been - on the shelf).

Apparently after his final mistake of 27.Bxf8, Szabo was so shocked that he sat there for half an hour, almost running down his time before he accepted the draw that Reshevsky had offered him, and was badly affected for a number of rounds afterwards. In any case, the sequence was extraordinary, and I'm giving it here without comment for you to critique - and then you can look at the pgn file.

20.Nf6+ Bxf6 21.Bxf6 Bxd5 22.cxd5 Qd6 23.Qc3 Qxd5 24.Rfd1 Qf5 25.e4 Qe6 26.Bg7 b6 27.Bxf8 Kxf8 ½–½

Two illustrious examples

The final two examples are both very famous in our illustrations of when a player refused to follow the opponent's narrative with an unexpected response.

Here Garry Kasparov played 46...gxh4, but Anatoly Karpov failed to recapture.

Paul Keres has brought all his major pieces to the h-file, trusting (hoping?) that after 19...gxh5 he would get at least enough for the rook.

Apparently, Vasily Smyslov was very conflicted about taking the bait because he feared that, if he didn't take the bait and failed to win, that would be really upsetting. As Bronstein points out, he couldn't possibly analyse accurately at the board but had to take a view and in the end he did decline the sacrifice with a better move – see the pgn.

All games

Select an entry from the list to switch between games

Master Class Vol.14 - Vasily Smyslov

Smyslov cultivated a clear positional style and even in sharp tactical positions often relied more on his intuition than on concrete calculation of variations. Let our authors introduce you into the world of Vasily Smyslov.

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