Adam beats a GM
In the first round at Hastings (see earlier article from 7 January), Adam Taylor was paired with the White pieces against last year’s winner, and top seed, GM Deep Sengupta (2586). Adam played well out of the opening, winning a knight for two pawns. The following position was reached after Black’s 23rd move:
Black’s last move was Rad8 (?) Adam now missed the best reply, both on his next move and the move after that. Although Adam went on to win after 57 moves, he could have probably forced his opponent to resign if he had found the best move. Can you see it?
Incidentally, after that first round loss, GM Sengupta went on to score 7/9 and share first place with Chinese IM Yiping Lou.
I am amazed that someone of Adam's undoubted ability should miss what was my first candidate move when I looked at this position. Checks, Captures and Threats in that order is part of my rudimentary chess thinking and here the only check on the board is the winning move. I am staggered that someone close to 2600 should fail to see this disaster in waiting before he played Ra-d8
This is a classic interference idea. Nd5 + wins the exchange for if the pawn takes the upstart knight then the support for the Black rook on D2 is destroyed and of course any Rook taking the Knight will be taken by the e4 pawn. For completeness moving the king anywhere out of check also loses the D2 rook.
David,
I'm sorry, but I must disagree. Being shown a position and knowing that there is "a tactic" to be found is a completely different proposition to finding such a move over the board in the middle of a competitive game.
It just goes to show how many moves the brains of even top players automatically disguard in the heat of battle, when in fact they can seem unfairly obvious when presented in isolation and out of context.
Stephen
The reason I missed this move and so did the 2600 is because in such a position we are thinking way beyond 1 movers in fact I was working out weather the knight vs 2 pawn endgame was winning, I calculated this really deeply and after deciding it was it is natural to just swap off the rooks. There was a similar case in the Olympiad where M Adams missed a knight fork to simply win. I hope this explains why 2 good players missed something so obvious
Good comments by David and a good reply by Adam.