BtM 24A: The 46th Memorable Game

January 1989, Position H

White to play

Westphal - Hresc, Porz 1988

Contributions to the comments box are welcome. I’ll reply with what the Masters have to say about their choice to anybody who suggests a move.

Scroll down to see some commentary from me and the Masters’ feedback.

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So memorable you can forget them?

"With White a pawn down and threatened with 1 … Bxc1, most of the panel realised that the tactical shot 1 Rc6, preventing … c5, was the best chance …."

CHESS Editor, Paul Lamford

Now here’s a funny thing: I found the 10-point answer - 1 Rc6 -  for this position. That’s far from a given in an of itself, but the real curiosity is that whilst the solution is inherently tactical, computers seem to struggle with it a little bit.

The panel’s guest computer for this month was the Fidelity 68000. It wanted to try 1 Rc3 after starting with 1 Rc2. Well 30+-year-old chess computers weren’t much cop, you might say … and you’d be right. Still, it takes my copy of HIARCS, admittedly running on a several years old Macbook Air, a little while to realise what’s going on.

With a beefier engine or a better computer you might well get different results, but here’s HIARCS’ thought process:-

0 seconds:

thinks 1 Rc6 is about or exactly 0.00 and bounces it between first and second choice.

30 seconds:

bumps the evaluation up to 1.2. From this point on it’s always the move HIARCS wants to play.

40 seconds:

evaluation goes up to 1.6 which is just about in the category of "winning", I’d say.

65 seconds:

evaluation jumps to 1.7

125 seconds:

evaluation reaches 2.0

175 seconds:

evaluation goes to 3.0+ and the experiment ends.

Now I’m not going to say I was faster than HIARCS - I wasn’t - but I did have 1 Rc6 as a one of my primary candidate moves right from the start. And I did work out a line that Paul Littlewood gave,

1 Rc6 bxc6, 2 Qc4 Qb7, 3 Nxc6 +-

And I did look at 1 … Bf6 as a possible defence, calculating

2 Rcxa6+ bxa6, 3 Nc6 leading to a win which is what happened in the source game.

Apparently Howell and Levitt rejected 1 Rc6 because of … Bf6. I’m not sure what they saw that scared them off, but after the line I looked at (3 … Qb7) or the game continuation (3 … Bd4 - as analysed by Littlewood) White is crushing Black.

I didn’t see Suba’s defensive idea of 1 … d5 although it doesn’t seem to work so perhaps that doesn’t matter too much.

Hardly,

but it was a decent effort by my standards

In truth, the calculations are not so difficult once you’ve seen 1 Rc6 is a possibility in the position. Sacrifice a rook on bishop 3, an empty square, thereby preventing Black from playing pawn to bishop 4.

At the time 1 Rc6 just looked natural. I didn’t think at all about why I wanted to play it. I just knew I did.

As soon as I sat down to write this post the reason I knew to play the winning move jumped right out at me. It’s just Fischer - Benko from the 1963/64 US Championships. Number 46 of Fischer’s 60 Memorable Games. The same move, the same reason as given by Paul Lamford.

It was pattern recognition (see: BtM 6) all along. I just didn’t know it.

More games at TADOC RAM

[Event "US Championship 1963/64"]

[Site "New York, NY USA"]

[Date "1963.12.30"]

[EventDate "1963.??.??"]

[Round "10"]

[Result "1-0"]

[White "Robert James Fischer"]

[Black "Pal Benko"]

[ECO "B09"]

[WhiteElo "?"]

[BlackElo "?"]

[PlyCount "41"]

1. e4 g6 2. d4 Bg7 3. Nc3 d6 4. f4 Nf6 5. Nf3 O-O 6. Bd3 Bg4

7. h3 Bxf3 8. Qxf3 Nc6 9. Be3 e5 10. dxe5 dxe5 11. f5 gxf5

12. Qxf5 Nd4 13. Qf2 Ne8 14. O-O Nd6 15. Qg3 Kh8 16. Qg4 c6

17. Qh5 Qe8 18. Bxd4 exd4 19. Rf6 Kg8 20. e5 h6 21. Ne2 1-0

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POINTS

10: Rc6

6:  Rc3

5:  Rcc4

4:  Rc2

2:  Rd1, Re1, Rf1

1:  f4

MASTERS

Rc6:  Suba, Davies, Flear, Norwood, P. Littlewood, Plaskett

Rc3:  Howell, Fidelity 68000

Rcc4: Levitt, S. Arkell 

SOURCE

20 Rc6, Westphal - Hresc, Porz 1988

PHOTO CREDIT:

(Human)chess thinker by David Llada