The 99 Percent, Part 2

The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake. – Savielly Tartakower

In the last part (part 1), I provided a couple of positions to ponder over. Here I provide the solutions, along with the original position as a refresher.

White to move

I didn’t spend enough time on the position and missed the equalizing reply (at least equalizing and according to Houdini, white would actually have a slight advantage). Though, to be honest, I might not have found the continuation even if I had taken more time. Here is the solution:

Here is the second position:

Black to move

Initially, both my opponent and I thought this was a drawn position. My initial analysis was that after the queen trade, both pawns would promote, white with check. I went ahead with the trade and before starting the pawn march, I looked at the position again and found the winning idea:

While I didn’t see the continuation in the first case, it holds true that one bad move can erase all the previous good moves. In the second case, I didn’t see that the position was won until doing further analysis after the trade. In both cases, it shows that I need to continue working on my tactics.

As promised, here are some additional tactics from my games for your enjoyment.

White to move: previous move h6

White to move: previous move Nbd7

White to move: previous move Qb7

White to move: previous move Ba6

As requested on the previous article, here are the full games, minus annotations (and variations, due to a bug in the plugin I’m using), from the two games from that article: