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Bacrot-Tiviakov: walking on eggshells

April 9, 2013

Jon Speelman’s excellent (for which read, his daily column has given me great pleasure over more years than I can remember) column in the Independent today caught my fancy.

Bacrot’s 55b5! is one of the those moves which are surprising-until-you-see-them-and-then-obvious, the type of move that I like to deceive myself into thinking I would have played: the type I call ‘obvious’. The honest part of me knows I wouldn’t, and that I would be likely to have played Bf1 with the forelorn hope of getting to the h3-c8 diagonal; only if I had a good deal of time might I have understood that opening more lines was necessary. Bacrot’s move opens more lines (diagonals) so that by losing a tempo he has a chance of breaking through, as he does in the game.

I was also intrigued by Jon’s very last words: I think Black can just hold. I played through the game (on the Chessbase online app on my iPad) and indeed could see why Jon said this. I decided to use this position which had a bit of doubt in it to do my first test of the newly released Finalgen software.

The result is indeed a draw: Jon was correct.

What intrigued me was that only two moves draw, the rest lose. So, I decided to explore the position a bit with Finalgen.

Firstly, this is the evaluation had it been black to move:

 


Only one move draws: the rest lose. I think with a lot more study I perhaps could get an understanding of the position, but whether in practice I could draw as black I am not so sure. I think that playing white, the best strategy is to fumble around with the bishop and king, and see what comes up, rather than doing something committal such as advancing the c pawn. For instance, this is the tablebase after 1 Be4:
It is not obvious to me whilst the only drawing moves are Kd7 or Kf6. Also, by moving forward step by step in Finalgen, at each stage black has only one or two safe moves, the rest losing: maybe there is a pattern, maybe some squares are mined, but black would be walking on eggshells, to be sure.

 

 

 

 

 

From → Chess

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