It’s Your Move: daily chess puzzle #260

White to play: evaluate 1 Ne6+ Qe6 2 Qe6 Bb2+ 3 Kb1 Ba3+=

(i.e. critique the line)

Larsen v Kavalek, Lugano 1970

Solution

If puzzle 258, a couple of days ago, was part of my teenage chess education, today’s puzzle is part of my 50s chess education, since I immediately recognised the position, and the player’s, from Kavalek’s Huffington Post article which was published on ChessBase . I had read the article, for its great analysis of the wonderful Carlsen-Li game from Qatar (and for its ill-researched claim about an early Ka1-Ka8 pattern in that game- see my earlier blog posting.

So, as so often happens in tactical sequences, the automatic recapture 2 Qe6 is ? and the zwischenschach 2 Bg7+ changes everything: 1-0