BtM 33A: Requiring original thought

September 1989, Position D

White to play

Hansen - Piket, Munich 1989

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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Today’s Beat the Masters position, the 130th I've looked at, is unique. It's the only one so far where one side has two queens.

I’ve often had problems in positions which have or lead to material imbalances.

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In my own defence, even GM James Plaskett  found today’s BtM tricky. "… perhaps the most difficult position yet to appear in this competition", was Jimbo’s opinion - and he was to be the British Champion the following year.

Levitt (not then a GM but he would get the title in the mid-90s)’s take: "An unusual position requiring original thought since players have little or no experience with two queens." Which is certainly true for me. I don’t recall ever having such a position in a serious game.

I suppose I should be grateful that, unlike the famous Fischer - Petrosian game from the 1959 Candidates' tournament, it was only White who two a pair of queens. It still took me a while to get a grip of what I wanted to be doing. You can’t move either rook or bishop because you get mated; you don’t want to be moving either of the queens because the threat of mate on g8 prevents Black from taking on f1; and if you try to do a runner with your king with something like 1 Kh2 and 2 Kg3 you just walk into … Qf4 mate.

Somewhere along the way I thought that White could generate a mirror threat with 1 Qe8 and 2 Qa8-c8  with the idea of 3 Qxg6+ Kxg6, 4 Qf5 mate … but eventually it dawned on me that Black’s king has f7 so it’s not mate after all.

Eventually, more or less because there was nothing else, I ended up with h2-h4. Which, once I saw it, seemed to me to be a pretty decent idea. Which was lucky because I never did find anything else.

Difficult it might have been, but today’s BtM was mostly certainly the "fascinating" position that Paul Lamford claimed it to be in his introduction.

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POINTS

10: Kh2

8:  h4

5:  Qe8, f4, Kh1

3:  Qc8, Qd5

MASTERS

Kh2: Suba, Adams, Plaskett, Lane, Botterill, Horner

h4:  Norwood, Levitt, Davies, P. Littlewood, 

f4:  Pein

Kh1: Fidelity Mach 3

SOURCE

Hansen - Piket, Munich 1989 38 Qe8