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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Lucky Oversight

After a couple of games today on Chessdotcom that were no more than bunny bashing, a player rated mid-1700 accepted my challenge. I figured it was best to play it safe and resort to my old standby, the Torre Attack but when he played 1…Nf6, I got another idea. Why not play the K-Indian 4-Pawns Attack? I know it’s not very popular but I’ve had some pretty good luck with it. If Black mishandles the opening he can get rolled up by the big P-center. On the other hand, if he plays correctly the P-center crumbles and White is in trouble.

Well, forget all that. The guy played the Q-Indian and I don’t too much about it. I figured that was OK though. What could go wrong? In a closed position I missed the fact that after 15.c5 b4 he was winning the exchange. What happened after that was we got a materially unbalanced position. I analyzed the game with the Houdini chess engine and to be truthful, I don’t know that its evaluations are always quite right. Engines tend to place a high value on material. That’s OK if you are the one with the extra material and can see your way through the complications and manage to hang on without blundering. Easier said than done for a human! Fortunately for me, it was my opponent who made a fatal blunder right at the end. I know the engine said I had the advantage, but I don’t play as well as Houdini, so I wasn’t so sure.

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