Friday, 6 January 2012

Australian Chess Championship 2011 round 9

The old guys are leading, Darryl Johansen by half a point, followed by Vladimir Smirnov and Steven Solomon. Vlad's son Anton is also doing well on 50%. If the table was any higher he wouldn't be able to see the pieces. I stole this picture from the photo gallery.



Steven beat Zong Yuan who is having a shocker. Perhaps he is too happy since getting married to play his best.

I had another exciting game that fizzled into a draw but I shouldn't whinge too much because my position at one point was dreadful. 12. .....Bc3 was awful. As I keep telling my pupils, develop your pieces before getting clever. Instead 12. ...Be6 and black is perfectly fine and more importantly has nothing to calculate. I was greedy but initially missed that I can't take on e4 after  15.f4 If I may quote Danish chess legend Bent Larsen, "long variation, wrong variation".

3 comments:

  1. Finally a lesson I can nearly understand. :) I get part 1 re: Bc3 & development, but am not sure what you mean by, "I can't take on e4 after 15.f4"... is it possible to explain? Thanks, sir. Enjoying these posts, btw.

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  2. Well I had intended to take the pawn on e4 after his move 15.f4. Then I looked at it deeper and discovered a problem, which upon further examination is imaginary so.....my entire assessment is flawed :-) Still, in principle you should always develop until all your pieces are playing.

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  3. How comforting to see that even superstars have flawed assessments. :) Thanks for the lesson.

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