SC Week 6/6: Petrosian - Mecking, Palma 1969 (Black squares and White squares)
"We see now the difference between strategy and attack. Attacks can be repulsed, but positional advantages do not suddenly vanish without trace."
Michael Stean
Notes and Observations
19 Bf4 and 20 Bc1 Petrosian is happy to burn two tempi just to drag a central pawn to a dark square, creating an outpost and d5 …
… but he’s not interested in that. 21 Bd5 allows Mecking to trade off the bishop, forcing White to block the outpost square with a pawn. Normally you’d want a piece on such a weak central square (see the Outposts chapter of week two). Petrosian wants the protected passed pawn and is already playing against the bad bishop on g7.
24 … f4 An over-optimistic attacking move, but Petrosian doesn’t rush to exploit it. He defends with the rook, blocks the kingside (and fixes more pawns on dark squares), ties Black down to defending a central pawn, trades a pair of rooks … and only then switches around with his last remaining rook to force a queen invasion on the light squares.
Again a really instructive game in my eyes. Beautiful fixing of the black pawns on the dark squares after indeed having provoked e5 (creating a badshop) and trading black's good bishop on d5.
ReplyDeleteFor me this games also shows the art of defence, by actually provoking a weak attack while in the meanwhile you created and stabilized stategic advantages that will simply be too overwhelming after the attack has been stopped.