Middlegame Lessons From Basel III

White has just played 14.Bf4-d2 in Jeremias Stark (1599) - Spanton (1814), Basel Round 3

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Black has to move the queen, but to where? The candidate moves, in my opinion, are 14...Qh5, 14...Qe5, 14...Qc7 and 14...Qa6, and here I want to deal with them in turn.

A) 14...Qh5

This comes to be, at least for a while, the second choice of the analysis engines Stockfish14 and Komodo12.1.1. The queen is actively placed on h5. But the activity of the black pieces, including a rook that will soon come to the half-open b file, is easier to direct against the white queenside, so it makes sense to place the black queen where it can add to this pressure.

B) 14...Qe5

A queen in the middle of the board in the middlegame is powerful if it cannot be molested, but is often subject to harassment. The latter looks more likely here, but it is not clear such harassment is beneficial to White. For example, 15.f4?? is a gross blunder thanks to 15...Qd4+, while 15.Bc3 Qf4 (or 15...Qh5) 16.Bxg7 Kxg7 leaves Black without his fianchettoed bishop but with the better remaining-bishop and with exploitable dark-square weaknesses in the white position. The engines reckon the best answer to 14...Qe5 is 15.Kh1, with what they rate as approximate equality.

C) 14...Qc7

This is what I played. The queen remains on the queenside but is not very active. The engines reckon Black has, at best, a slight edge.

D) 14...Qa6

General principles in chess are often a useful guide to finding good moves, but many times two general principles clash. Here 14...Qa6 runs contrary to the general principle of not placing the queen in the firing line of a weaker piece, but conforms with the general principle of pinning enemy men (in this case the c4 pawn). I rejected 14...Qa6 because of 15.Qc2?!, missing that 15...Nb6 costs White a pawn, eg 16.Nxb6 Qxb6+ and 17...Qxb2. Note that in this line 16.c5? loses to 16...Qxa4 17.cxb6 Qxc2 18.Bxc2 Bxb2 19.Rab1 Bd4+. The engines reckon the best answer to 14...Qa6 is 15.b3!?, when Black can probably accept the exchange, but is also much better, according to the engines, after the simple 15...Nb6.

In conclusion, it seems 14...Qa6 is best.