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:
[Event "Kansas Open 2012"]
[Site "Overland Park, KS"]
[Date "2012.07.21"]
[Round "3"]
[White "Martin D Stahl"]
[Black "Kiana Hajiarbabi"]
[Result "0-1"]
[FEN "1nr2r2/p2k1p1p/1pb2np1/1B6/P2PP3/2R2P2/4N1PP/2R1K3 w – – 1 23"]
23.Rxc6 Nxc6 24.d5 { Winning the pinned knight and equalizing material. }
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:
[Site "Joplin Chess Club"]
[Date "2013.01.01"]
[Round "-"]
[White "Daniel L Todd"]
[Black "Martin D Stahl"]
[Result "0-1"]
[FEN "7k/6p1/7p/p6P/4Q3/1Pq4P/5PK1/8 w – – 14 48"]
48. Qc4 Qxc4 49.bxc4 Kg8 { Black’s king is now in the square of the pawn and can prevent the promotion. The pawn on a5 can not be stopped.}
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:
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