In some ways this is a truism since the only way to win a game of chess, short of the opponent resigning, is to deliver checkmate - 'merely' capturing every enemy piece, apart from the king, is not enough.
Most decisive games actually end with resignation, but only because the player resigning thinks checkmate is inevitable.
Games between complete novices, however, nearly always end with one of two results - checkmate or stalemate.
Draws in such games are theoretically possible, but rarely happen before the board is reduced to bare kings.
Even bare kings may not be enough, if a story told me by an arbiter at the British championships is true.
He reckons he saw a game in which two very young juniors got down to bare kings, but continued playing.
The arbiter left them to it and went to look at other games, only to return a few minutes later when he saw the boys resetting the pieces.
"That was a a draw, then?" the arbiter half-said/half-asked.
"Oh no," replied one of the boys, "my opponent managed to promote his king to a queen and so won."
The story is probably apocryphal - after all, how to you mate with a lone queen? - and anyway is something of a digression from the point of this post, which about king safety.
The critical position in my round-two game occurred at move 12.
 |
| I have just played 12.d5!? |
*****
*****
*****
*****
12...e4?!
Black is roughly equal, or at least only slightly worse, according to Stockfish15 and Komodo13.02, after 12...Bxf3 13.Bxf3 Nd4 or 12...Ne7.
Black is roughly equal, or at least only slightly worse, according to Stockfish15 and Komodo13.02, after 12...Bxf3 13.Bxf3 Nd4 or 12...Ne7.
The text wins the exchange after 13.Nxe4 Bxa1 but loses the game thanks to the chronic weakness of the black king, now it no longer has a fianchettoed bishop.
The game lasted a further 20 moves, but the result, at least according to the engines, was never in doubt.
No comments:
Post a Comment