SC Week 7/5: Smyslov - Gudmundsson, Reykjavik 1974 (Space)

 "The difficult part of a spatial strategy lies not in the execution which is relatively simple, but in the recognition of the fact that you actually do have an advantage in space."

Michael Stean

Notes and Observations

A baffling game. After 20 bxc4 Black seems fine. Smyslov has a knight on the rim and a bad bishop. Gudmundsson has occupied an open file and has a centralised knight on e5. After 25 Ne4 though - just five not particularly noteworthy moves later - it’s clear that Black is getting pushed off the board.

18 Bf1 Reminiscent of Botvinnik - Szilagyi (Introduction/2). The bishop isn’t doing anything on g2 so Smyslov reroutes it. On Bf1 it defends the potential weak point on c4 and can later come out to d3 from where it points at Black’s king.

19 Nh4 From here the knight will play no further part in the game other than to let itself be taken at the beginning of Smyslov’s mating attack on Black’s king. The point of keeping it on the board is to prevent Black from getting his bishop off it. The result is that Black ends up with two pieces that want the d7 square.

21 f4, 24 h3, 26 g4 Technically, Smyslov exposes his king with these pawn advances but Black’s even less likely to be able to exploit that than Uhlmann was against Karpov (Open Files/4). It would have been a different story if the centre had been blocked or if Black still had a bishop that could land on d4.

Smyslov’s kingside - a kind of positional pawn storm - is both the cause and the proof of his space advantage.

Reminders

Black squares and White squares are important in this game. See Stean’s note to White’s 17th move.

Aagaard (Excelling at Chess) and Watson (Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy) debate the kind of King’s Indian structure - albeit not the exact position seen in Smyslov - Gudmundsson) where Black has a knight on a5 and a pawn on b5 with potential for … bxc4 and play against the weak pawn left on c4 and play down the b-file.