The Ruy Lopez for White - Open Lopez Part 2

Hello everyone,

Last time we had studied Variation A in the Open Lopez. Hope the main concept of the Open Lopez is clear in your head by now.

We will move forward and today we will study Black's 9th move alternative, Variation B: 9...Be7. Now this Variation has two sub-variation as Black's 12th move alternatives.

Let's start with Variation B1: 12...0-0:

Ruy_Lopez/Variation B1.pgn




Now let's move onto the next reply, Variation B2: 12...Qd7:

Ruy_Lopez/Variation B2.pgn

So, this was Black's second 9th move alternative. Hope you have enjoyed. Next time we will start discussion on Black's third 9th move alternative.

Keep visiting and keep reading. 

Thanks a lot. Enjoy!!
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The Ruy Lopez for White - Open Lopez Part 1

Hello everyone,

We have completed our study of the Moller and Arkhangelsk Variations in our last post. Hope you have it clear in your head by now.

Today we will start a new chapter in the Ruy Lopez, the Open Lopez. This is a little bit different from what we have seen in Berlin Defence, Deffered Steinitz and the recent Moller and Arkhangelsk Variations. Lets see how it goes:

1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 a6 4 Ba4 Nf6 5 0-0 Nxe4

With 5...Nxe4 Black basically chooses dynamic counterplay over solid defence . He makes space for his pieces to develop onto active posts and squashes any thoughts White might have of applying the 'Spanish Torture' so often seen in the closed defences .

However, there's a certain price to pay for all this activity. The position becomes open quite quickly and in order not to suffer a quick onslaught down the e-file, Black is forced to compromise his pawn-structure someWhat, leaving White with potential targets to exploit in the middlegame. Nevertheless, the Open Defence has Its fair share of supporters. Viktor Korchnoi is probably its most famous adherent, while of the new generation of top players one could point to Vishy Anand, who employed it in his 1995 World Championship clash with Kasparov and has continued to use it since.

The Strategic Starting Position

This is the typical position, which is reached after 8 moves of the Open Lopez. The first thing to notice is that Black 's pieces occupy active squares. Given a few free moves, Black would probably continue with ...Bc5, ...0-0 and perhaps ...f6, to create a semiopen f-file and attack the f2-square. It goes without saying that White must act energetically in the diagram position, else Black could easily take over the initiative once he has completed his development. Here I'm advocating the move 9 Nbd2, which was made popular by Anatoly Karpov. One of White's main ideas is to put immediate pressure on Black's strong knight on e4. This pressure can be enhanced with such moves as c3 and Bc2 . Black is asked very early on what to do with this knight.

Black Supports the Knight with ...f5

Black has just played 11...f5, lending support to the under-fire knight. White now has a big decision to make : whether to capture en passant, or to play around the knight and concentrate on the weaknesses in the black camp. On this occasion the main theoretical move is 12 Nb3 (instead of 12 exf6). After 12...Qd7 White can use a tactical trick to justify the move 13 Nfd4. Now 13...Nxe5? 14 f3 Nc5 15 Re1 Nc6 16 Nxc6 Qxc6 17 Nd4 Qd7 18 b4 drops a piece, so the normal continuation is 13...Nxd4 14 Nxd4 c5 15 Nxe6 Qxe6 16 f3 Ng5 17 a4 , when White is slightly better (see the theory section for more on this position).

Black Moves the Knight

On this occasion Black has retreated his knight to c5, where it controls some important squares . One of White's major plans in this position involves the usual knight manoeuvre with (after Re1) Nf1-g3/e3 . White's pieces would then point impressively at the black kingside. In addition, White has the e5-pawn as a spearhead, so it's easy to see that White can often build up a menacing attack against the black king. White also often plays Nb3, challenging the c5-knight. If this is exchanged, it clears the way for the white queen to go to d3, where it sets up a powerful battery with the bishop against the h7-pawn .
For the reasons outlined above, Black often delays castling in favour of first improving the position of his pieces . For example, Black often plays the move ...Bg4, giving White a pin to think about. This bishop can also be re-routed via h5 to g6, in order to blunt White's attack along the b1-h7 diagonal. This also leaves the e6-square vacant for the knight to hop back and completely block the e5-pawn. Another common feature is Black doubling behind the d-pawn with ...Qd7 and ...Rd8. The idea of this is not only to add extra support to the oftenvulnerable d5-pawn, but also to facilitate a possible ,..d4 advance. Of course the strength of this advance is always dependent on the placing of the various pieces, but a successful ...d4 will completely free Black's position .

Now let's move on to the different lines in this Variation. There are typically three different lines revolving around Black's 9th move alternatives, which again have different sub-variations based on Black's 11th and 12th moves.
Let's start with Variation A: 9...Bc5
Ruy_Lopez/Variation A.pgn

This is how it goes. We will study Variation B in our next post.

Keep visiting and keep reading.

Thanks a lot. Enjoy!!
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December 2008 Chess Puzzle Contest

From now on we will be holding "Puzzle Contests" every month. You have to solve the puzzles and comment on relevant posts with the move sequence. Each month we will randomly pick a maximum of 2 commenters with correct solutions who will get a surprise gift delivered to their inbox( you have to leave your email address here ). Now what's the gift? If you are one of our email subscribers then you already got our subscription gift...isn't it? Well the prize for the contests will be something like that ( but not Everyman ebooks). Common solve it & comment & you will know .

Every month's top commenter is also eligible for the prize even if he/she is unable to solve the puzzle.

Lets move on to the puzzle of this month....

This position is from Burn - Teichmann, Hastings 1895. White's doubled pawns on the f-file hamper him in his attempts to defend his king.How did black exploit this? Black to play.You have to find the best sequence of moves that leads to mate.

Leave you solutions here with your email address. Entries after this month are not eligible for the contest. So what are you waiting for? It's time for your neurons to do some calculations...

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Sexy maths: Skills of a Chess Grandmaster

For a while, the chess Olympiad this year looked like producing a surprise winner but closer inspection of Israel's team sheet revealed that it was pretty much business as usual: half the players were named Boris!

Other than a brief blip in the 1970s, the biennial event has produced remarkably consistent results. From 1952 to 1990, the Soviet Union ruled the contest, and after the superstate's fragmentation either Russia or one of its former union satellites struck gold every time. As it turned out this year, the Soviet diaspora's turn in the spotlight was short-lived and Armenia triumphed for its second successive Olympiad.

Despite being connected by being born under the red flag, those that dominate the game are better categorised by their membership of a different club: the mathematical mafia. Legend has it that the game was invented by a mathematician in India who elicited a huge reward for its creation. The King of India was so impressed with the game that he asked the mathematician to name a prize as reward. Not wishing to appear greedy, the mathematician asked for one grain of rice to be placed on the first square of the chess board, two grains on the second, four on the third and so on. The number of grains of rice should be doubled each time.

The King thought that he'd got away lightly, but little did he realise the power of doubling to make things big very quickly. By the sixteenth square there was already a kilo of rice on the chess board. By the twentieth square his servant needed to bring in a wheelbarrow of rice. He never reached the 64th and last square on the board. By that point the rice on the board would have totalled a staggering 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains.

Playing chess has strong resonances with doing mathematics. There are simple rules for the way each chess piece moves but beyond these basic constraints, the pieces can roam freely across the board. Mathematics also proceeds by taking self-evident truths (called axioms) about properties of numbers and geometry and then by applying basic rules of logic you proceed to move mathematics from its starting point to deduce new statements about numbers and geometry. For example, using the moves allowed by mathematics the 18th-century mathematician Lagrange reached an endgame that showed that every number can be written as the sum of four square numbers, a far from obvious fact. For example, 310 = 172 +42 + 22 + 12.

Some mathematicians have turned their analytic skills on the game of chess itself. A classic problem called the Knight's Tour asks whether it is possible to use a knight to jump around the chess board visiting each square once only. The first examples were documented in a 9th-century Arabic manuscript. It is only within the past decade that mathematical techniques have been developed to count exactly how many such tours are possible.

It isn't just mathematicians and chess players who have been fascinated by the Knight's Tour. The highly styled Sanskrit poem Kavyalankara presents the Knight's Tour in verse form. And in the 20th century, the French author Georges Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual describes an apartment with 100 rooms arranged in a 10x10 grid. In the novel the order that the author visits the rooms is determined by a Knight's Tour on a 10x10 chessboard.

Mathematicians have also analysed just how many games of chess are possible. If you were to line up chessboards side by side, the number of them you would need to reach from one side of the observable universe to the other would require only 28 digits. Yet Claude Shannon, the mathematician credited as the father of the digital age, estimated that the number of unique games you could play was of the order of 10120 (a 1 followed by 120 0s). It's this level of complexity that makes chess such an attractive game and ensures that at the Olympiad in Russia in 2010, local spectators will witness games of chess never before seen by the human eye, even if the winning team turns out to have familiar names.

 Article Source : Times Online
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