A good old-fashioned dragon slaying.

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I recognize that posting games by Michael Basman (especially games with Grob’s Attack) may violate anti-pornography laws but I believe in free speech.

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International master Jean Hébert sacrifices his queen and secures an easy draw against future strong grandmaster (and World Champion candidate) Kevin Spraggett. Hébert then gets the win when Spraggett (possibly in time pressure, possibly trying to avoid the draw, possibly both) stumbles into a mating net.

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Ulf Andersson is famous for this type of slow squeeze where his opponent’s position gets slowly and imperceptibly worse before cracking under the pressure.

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This must have been a very painful loss for White. Imagine you have a grandmaster on the ropes and the fat lady is tuning up her vocal cords for the big aria when you miss the simple 24. Kb2 (or 24. Kc2). A few moves later, you follow up with 28. g3? and before you know it, your king is walking the plank. Kinda like that old Warner Brothers cartoon where Yosemite Sam has Bugs all tied up and out on a plank when Bugs gives the plank a kick and it spins around and Sam’s the one taking the fall.

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Sorry, this feature appears a day late this week. I am planning to post a game every Sunday but I was away for the weekend celebrating my 60th birthday. Also, I haven’t gotten around to testing various plug-ins that would allow me to include some annotations. That will happen at some point.

The winner of this game is an obscure Soviet player who never got a FIDE title (and later emigrated to Israel and the United States, where he died). But he did play in the 1959 Soviet Championship where he beat Tal and drew Spassky. I offer this game so that you can pity the poor black bishop on h8.

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I have managed to put together a database of some 80,000+ games not in ChessBase’s Megabase (2017 version). They’re from obscure websites, old magazines and wherever else I could find them. Many, if not most, are “fish” games but many are master and grandmaster games. I’m planning on using them for a “Game of the week” feature and posting one every Monday. The first is a nice grandmaster game from the 1985 US Open. For the time being, I offer them without any annotation since the WordPress plug-in I’m using doesn’t allow you to play through variations (I’m open to suggestions as to which plug-in I should use).

Update: In an email, Yasser writes “That was some old home brew cooking that Lev fell into. ” He also suggests that a good question for students is where White went wrong. Ideas?

Views: 235