It’s Your Move: daily chess puzzle # 84

Black to play: is 1…Rg3+ merely a draw?

Aloni v Botvinnik, Tel Aviv 1964

Solution

The answer to the question, is it merely a draw?, is clearly ‘no’, given who the two players are. But how? By comparison with the last two days’ puzzles, this one was tough, and took me a while to solve. Eventually I saw the ‘trick’, the ‘idea’, and most of the variations.

1…Rg3+ 2 fg[] Qg3+ 3 Kh1[] d3!

This has the twin idea of removing the coordination between white’s Qb1 and Re4 (which is now a LPDO) and threatening to push on and promote the pawn, or cause mischief with it.

4 Qe1 (White has other tries, but they are similar) Qh3+ 5 Kh1[] d2!

6 Qd1 (6 Ne7+ Kh8 7 Ng6+ is a nice try, but 7…hg[] 8 Rh4+ Kg8! prevails)

Black to play and win

I saw this far (it is more or less a forced line) and had envisioned 6..Rf1+! 7 Qf1[] Qf1+ 8 Kf1 d1(Q)+ and felt that Black might be winning (and Houdini says that he is, though there is plenty of room for mistakes). However, Black has better.

Solution

6…Bd4+!! 7 Rd4 Qg3+ 8 Kh1[] Qe1+ and promotes. Lovely.

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