One of my teammates at this year’s US Amateur Team tournament, Larry Smith, has an interesting semi-blog. It isn’t publicly accessible like a blog is, but he sends out chess-related e-mails a few times a week to a couple dozen people on his distribution list. The e-mails are usually of the “position of the day” variety but they sometimes go into a little bit more depth to explore a theme. He sent out a very interesting one earlier this month that I’d like to share with you.
Position after 33. … Kh8. White to move.
FEN: 3r1b1k/q4Bpp/p2P4/2p5/2Pp1Q2/3P2PP/P7/5RK1 w – – 0 34
This is a game between Bjarne Light and Peter Frost from this year’s Kiel tournament, played in July. Naturally, a lover of word play like me has to note the rarity of seeing Light-Frost in July.
Anyway, see if you can find White’s best move, and if you want to pay along with Larry Smith’s e-mail, take a note of how much time it takes you.
Some back story: Larry got this position from Susan Polgar’s blog, and she got it from a site of Alex Baburin called ChessToday.net. So you’re getting from me fourth-hand! The caption to the position on Baburin’s site is very telling: “Daily Chess Improvement: 8 Second Chess Tactic!” In other words, you’re supposed to solve it in 8 seconds or less.
I was able to spot the key move in easily less than 8 seconds: it was the first move I looked at. I spent a minute or so making sure that it really worked and that there wasn’t anything better, but if I had been down to a few seconds in a blitz game, there’s no question that I would have played the move in the game: 34. Be8!
It’s a neat idea. White puts both his bishop and pawn en prise, but whichever one Black takes, his back rank is too weakly defended and he loses to Q(x)f8+. Black could create luft for his king with 34. … h6, but he loses a piece right away to 35. Qxf8+ and it’s obvious that more losses are coming. In the game, Light simply resigned.
Larry had a very similar experience to mine. He wrote, “I didn’t so much solve the puzzle as the move 1. Be8! popped into my brain. It was a reflex that I had no control over.”
As he was puzzling over why this instantaneous flash of insight occurred, Larry realized he had seen the combination before! In fact, it occurred in the game Reti-Bogolyubov from New York 1924, one of the most famous tournaments ever.
Position after 24. … Kh8. White to move.
FEN: 3r1b1k/ppq2Bpp/2p5/2P2Q2/8/1P4P1/P6P/5RK1 w – – 0 25
The positions are so similar that it’s uncanny — only the positions of Black’s queen and a few pawns are different, and they do not affect the combination in any way. Now that you’ve seen the pattern, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble figuring out Reti’s move, 25. Be8! Once again, Black resigned immediately. The only complication that wasn’t present in the earlier game is that Black could try interpolating 25. … Bxc5+ 26. Qxc5 Rxe8. However, whether by luck or design, the White queen is still attacking f8, so 27. Rf8+ (or 27. Qf8+ if you want to be flashy) leads to a back-rank mate.
So now Larry was wondering: Did he solve the Light-Frost position so quickly because it had been implanted in his brain already? If he were truly seeing it for the first time, would he be able to come up with the answer so fast?
That’s when he decided to do an experiment with his e-mail discussion list. He asked his friends whether they had found the key move, how long it took, and whether the position looked “familiar.” Four out of 11 said that it “looked familiar” (two knew the exact game Reti-Bogoljubov) and of those, three solved it in under 5 seconds and the other solved it in under a minute.
As for the other seven, who did not recognize the position, six of them took significantly longer, from 1 to 10 minutes. So it seemed that recognizing the motif helped. The one person who did not recognize it but still solved in in 5 seconds… was me.
That complicates things a bit, because it introduces another factor — player strength. The four people who recognized the position were all over 2000. I’m also over 2000. So maybe you don’t need to know chess history. Maybe people over 2000 are just good enough at spotting mating patterns that they will solve a puzzle like this very quickly. Speaking for myself, it was as easy as 1-2-3. (1) I want to open the f-file. (2) I want to set up a back-rank mate, and cutting Black’s rook off from the defense of the bishop would help. (3) Be8 does both things.
So in the end, Larry’s experiment didn’t have a definite conclusion. Maybe the moral is that studying the classics can teach you to recognize important patterns, but also hours of practice and years of exposure to chess ideas can accomplish the same thing. I do feel a trifle embarrassed that I don’t know my chess history as well as the four who recognized the idea; on the other hand, I feel a little bit pleased that, alone out of Larry’s 11 respondents, I solved the puzzle immediately without having seen the idea before.
By the way, one thing that impressed me as I played out the games (not just looking at the static positions) was that both Reti and Light saw the combination coming. Both of them played Bf7+ on the previous move to chase Black’s king to the corner and set up the back-rank mate.
Unrelated postscript: One of my readers informed me that the link to the “Bird by Bird” series on the right-hand side of my blog page is now broken. I’m not quite sure what is causing this issue. It’s stored on a part of my website that I thought would be more stable than the blog, so it’s a shock to see it disappear all of a sudden. Probably I should take this as a warning that I need to update and upgrade my blog site, too.
This is something that annoys me about computers. I feel as if they should be designed like most other appliances, in such a way that once they are working, they should continue working unless they literally break. But with computers, the outside world is constantly changing and so the interface between the computer and the outside world changes, and sometimes software that worked perfectly well one day no longer works the next. Argh!
