Friday 15 April 2016

Chess Tactic of the Day #1

A few days ago, I was playing a 1-minute game with the black pieces. After white's 36th move in this Dutch Defense, the following position arose:

Black to play and win.










SPOILERS BELOW




SPOILERS BELOW





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SPOILERS BELOW



OKAY SERIOUSLY

(In future I will try to come up with a better way of doing this).
If I had found 36...Nh3! I would have won on the spot. The point is that this cuts off the g1 square from white's king, and sets up the irresistible threat of 37...Qh6 followed by 38...Nxf2+. Despite having a couple moves, white is helpless to wriggle out of this, OR to create fast enough counterplay to distract black's pieces from the attack.

In the actual game, I had about 25 seconds left, and spent about 5 of them trying to make Qh6 work immediately. When that wasn't working out, I played the lemon 36...Ne4 and went on to lose.

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