I want to show you a game today that is a mystery in more ways than one.
Here is Mystery Number One. This game was played about a month ago. One player is a grandmaster who is very active in American chess. The other player is 17 years old, has a provisional USCF rating and was playing his ninth tournament game ever. Can you tell which is which?
Mystery Player 1 vs. Mystery Player 2
1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 Nf6 3. d3 Nc6 4. Nc3 Be7 5. f4 O-O 6. Nf3 ef 7. Bxf4 Na5
White to move.
I’ll put in diagrams every few moves to help you follow the game. So far it’s a fairly standard Vienna Game/Bishop’s Opening, except that Black has delayed … d6 for reasons known only to him. In the few database games that have reached this position, White usually played 8. Bb3, but White apparently considered rapid development to be more important than pawn structure.
8. O-O Nxc4 9. dc d6 10. h3 c6 11. b3 Nh5 12. Bh2 Qa5 13. Qd2 Bf6 14. Nd4 Qb6 15. Rfd1 Be5
White to move.
I didn’t like White’s 13. Qd2, but I don’t think he has done irreparable damage to his position yet. I think that White is still in the game after 16. Na4. For instance, if 16. … Bxh2+ 17. Kxh2 Qc7 18. Qg5! Nf6 19. Nc3! (It’s more important for White to coordinate his pieces than to worry about the discovered check.) 19. … d5+ 20. e5 Re8 I could see either side winning. I especially like the line 21. cd Rxe5 22. d6!! Qxd6 23. Nf5! and White wins! If 23. … Rxf5+ 24. Rxd6 and the back-rank mate threat decides. Or if 22. … Rxg5 23. dc, it’s very hard for Black to stop the passed pawn.
But for some strange reason, White gives up a piece with 16. Bxe5?? What could he have been thinking? The game continued 16. … de 17. Na4 Qxd4+ 18. Qxd4 ed 19. Rxd4 Be6 20. Rad1 Nf6 21. e5 Ne8 22. Nc5 b6!
White to move.
This is about the best White’s position has gotten since he blundered/sacrificed the piece. Maybe he was planning to play 23. Nxe6 fe 24. Rd7, but it’s nowhere near good enough after 24. … Rf7 25. Rxf7 Kxf7 26. Rd7+ Kf8. White has a good temporary bind, but Black is eventually going to wriggle out of it, sacrificing one of the queenside pawns if he has to. In any event, White changed his mind but now the pressure on Black eases.
23. Ne4 c5 24. R4d2 Nc7 25. Nd6 Rad8 26. Nb5 …
Black to move.
And now something truly unbelievable happened. But before I tell you what happened next, let me get back to that question I asked you. Who is the grandmaster, and who is the teenager who has played only eight rated games in his entire life?
The correct answer: White is the grandmaster, and Black is the teenager! That’s right, it’s the grandmaster who accepted the isolated pawn on e4, created all those dark-square weaknesses, and finally, unaccountably, sacrificed/blundered his knight on d4, a blunder so obvious that any club player would see it. His name is Nikola Mitkov, a player with a FIDE rating of 2527. He was the highest-rated player at the Chicago Class Championship, where this game was played in the first round, and in fact he eventually tied for first place in the tournament with a score of 4-1.
As for Mystery Player 2, his name is Alex Ding. He subscribed to chess.com about a year ago, heard about USCF tournaments, thought they sounded like fun, and entered one. At his first tournament he earned a provisional rating of 2286 (4 games). After his second tournament he went down 100 points. At the Chicago tournament he went 2-3 against five masters (including this game), a not-too-bad result that kept his rating at 2178. He gives some light annotation of this game at his chess.com webpage (which is where I got this game from).
Now let me tell you the unbelievable story of how this game ended. Ding says that he now played 26. … Bxh3??? and immediately resigned. His laconic comment is “touched moved. A win thrown away.”
I can’t even begin to imagine the emotions that were going on. Here you are on BOARD ONE of a big tournament, playing a GRANDMASTER in the ninth game of your entire chess career, and you’re WINNING. And then you touch the bishop! Why, in this position, would you even dream of touching the bishop? I can’t fathom any reason why Black, with two pieces en prise, would touch a third one. Unless he did it by accident. But if it was truly an accident, then certainly the gentlemanly thing for a grandmaster to do against a kid would be to acknowledge it was an accident and let him play the move he intended to play.
I admit I’ve won a couple games in my life on the touch-move rule. One was even in a position where I probably would have lost otherwise. But in both cases, it was very clear that my opponent intended to move the piece, picked it up, and then saw what was wrong with the move. In this position, I can’t imagine how Ding could have picked up the bishop with intent to move it.
So that’s the real mystery of this game, to me (on top of the other mysteries like how a GM could play so badly). Did Ding really intend to move the piece? Or did the GM win because of an inadvertent touch?
Anyway, I hope that Ding will get another chance sometime to beat a GM, but I’m warning him: It’s hard. I’ve been playing tournament chess for 39 years and who knows how many hundred games, and I have never come close to beating a grandmaster.
