White to play and win (if you are Magnus Carlsen)

White to play (and win)

Shak has just played the perfectly plausible 1…c6-c5. I am writing this from our cottage in Borrowdale, having just finished a lovely Easter Sunday walk around Derwentwater. Boots off/kettle on/Playchess.com…to find the result, and lo and behold!, Magnus has won in Magnus-style.

At the time of writing, neither Chessbase.com nor Chessvibes.com have posted any analysis, but Jonathan Rowson has tweeted https://twitter.com/jonathan_rowson/status/457913464028401664 summed the game up as being elegant, accurate and brutal; and better than Karpovian.

I suspect we will find that c6-c5 is a 'bad' move. After Magnus's reply 2 d5 (obvious) ed (equally obvious) the move of the day is 3 Rd5!!

I presume mere mortals, which includes many GMs, would play 3cd, by rote, and we would then have a typical unbalanced position, the question being whether white can break through on the king side before black's queen side pawns can roll.

But after Magnus's 3 Rd5!! the simple fact- simple once Magnus has played Rd5-is that white is nearly a piece up. Black's bishop is out of play, and in the rest of the game Magnus keeps it that way, with the next key move being Rd3 in the diagram below.

Jonathan's reference to Karpovian is because he keeps things simple or, rather, gives the appearance of simplicity. There are minor tactics throughout the game, and the simplicity belies the maintenance of the initiative and pressure.

It will be interesting to see what the GM commentators say. There is a risk in blogging too soon that I have missed the point, but Jonathan's tweet reassures me. My suspicion is that 17…c5 will be considered to be a mistake, with 17…Be7 being preferable. Also, after 19 Rd5!! white's bishop hasn't got many squares to go to (it didn't want to go to e3, but had to: on f4 the black knight could biff it, and make it retreat to the even worse square g3). My suspicion is that Shak's Nf8-g6-e7 was the wrong routing for the N, which instead should have gone Nf8-e6, supporting the c5 pawn, so that a7-a6 and b6-b5 stand a chance of releasing the Ba3.

But I have not much confidence in Nf8-e6.

A bravura performance by Magnus.

Posted with Blogsy