A truly beautiful move #chess

Thanks to John Saunders for pointing the incredible move in the position below out. In his Chessbase posting about the recent 4NCL weekend, he shows this variation from one of Gawain Jones' games.

White to play and win

Try to find a beautiful finish. Worth setting the pieces out, pouring a glass of wine or your favourite tipple, and delving into the position.

Solution

John writes that his engine found 1 Ba6!! I actually think several more exclamation marks are needed, or maybe a mixture of !! and hearts, because the move is truly beautiful. He quite rightly doesn't give variations, instead writing 'I leave the reader to look in wonder upon on it'. Well done, John.

I have just had a lovely hour or so working through the position, gaining an understanding of it. Now that I do, I could make it into a really hard puzzle:

How many bishop moves in the above positon win?

Solution

The answer is, I think, four:

1 Ba6!!!! which is sheer beauty: its point is profound. The Ra8 is tied to the back rank, because of the mating possibilities caused by the Ph6.

1 Be8!!! which to me is slightly less aesthetically pleasing, since its point- to gain a tempo after 1…Re8 by 2 d7, biffing the R, with the pawn on d7 not actually threatening to queen, but more importantly controlling c8, so preventing Rc5-c8;

1 Bd7!! which is still pretty, its point being to stay on the a4-e8 diagonal, so that after the Pa5 and a pair of rooks come off (1…Rca5 2 Ra5 Ra5), white can play 3 Bc6! controlling a8, so the rook can't retreat.

1 Bf1, which is the move I would play ten times out of time, but is prosaic. Analysis shows that, with some care, white dominates, though when I first played the line, I messed up by order of moves (thinking white should be playing Rc8 to try to dominate the positon, but in fact he should control d7 with Bb5, and play for an additional threat with Re2).

The other bishop moves are weaker: Ba4 self pins after Rca5; Bc4?? loses a piece, Bd3? loses control over the d file and self pins (Rd5), whilst Be2? blocks the e file- a file which I would not have guessed was important in the initial position.

In some ways, the position is an example of the principle of two weaknesses: one being the threat to promote, the second being the threat to mate. My analysis is attached, as a game file generated by Chessbase12's one click publish feature.

Posted with Blogsy