It’s Your Move: daily chess puzzle #238

White to play and win

Darga v Stein, Amsterdam 1969

Solution

I more or less immediately knew the answer had to be trap the Be7 with the Pd5 pushing to d6, but was troubled about the way to do it, and also whether to many pawns or too many weaknesses would be created. In the end, I found the game continuation, though had it been my own game, I might have chickened out and played a routine move like 1 b3.

However, it being a problem I did find 1 c5! forcing 1… Nbd5, when 2 cd Bd6[] 3 Nd6 Qd6[] results in this position.

Here, the Qd6 is a LPDO and there is a jump-biff Qd1-d6, using Purdy’s language, so firstly the Pe2  pin must be broken by 4 g4 Bg6 and then 5 e4 wins a piece.

Then after some simplification the end result is:

White is better, and my engine says +2, though if I were playing White against Magnus Carlsen I would not be confident of success. The whole game is worth playing through to see how Darga beat the great Leonard Stein; the game is in Megabase.

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