33
One amazing game I know that ends in a pawn mate in one called The Polish Immortal in which Black sacrifices all four minor pieces to win the game! The pawn does a double-step to give the mate.
[Title "Glucksberg-Miguel Najdorf, Warsaw Poland, 1929, The Polish Immortal"]
[FEN ""]
1.d4 f5 2.c4 Nf6 3.Nc3 e6 4.Nf3 d5 5.e3 c6 6.Bd3 Bd6 7.O-O ...
25
As noted in the first comment to your question, there are certainly a lot of draws. To narrow it down to reasonable games that were wins, I searched the Mega 2019 Database for games with both players above 2500, and wins with moves between 4-10. It returned 131 games. Of those games, whether due to the remaining moves simply not being transmitted, someone ...
22
I agree with you, more than your coach. Just analyzing a GM game, even with a computer, is not helpful just by itself if you have no idea what is going on.
For example, just earlier today, I answered a question here, where the person gave a computer line that made no sense as far as the plans for the position were concerned, so the computer was really no ...
20
The answer from SmallChess is good. There's also an illustrative tweet from Garry Kasparov on the subject:
For beginning chess players, studying a Carlsen game is like wanting to be an electrical engineer & beginning with studying an iPhone.
16
https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-to-avoid-blunders-part-two
In one of his books GM Alexander Kotov even coined a term "Dizziness due to success" which describes Chigorin's blunder that we just witnessed pretty accurately. Kotov even tells his own story. He was playing a game and achieved a completely winning position. His opponent lost any ...
16
Paul Morphy's games are better resources for learning at your level. There's no use for you to get into deep positional understanding typically in modern GM games.
You should get a book on Amazon. Don't try to analyze the games yourself.
15
In my experience, memorization of chess games simply came from improvement. I first realized that I could remember the games of past tournaments when I was around 1600 ELO, and as I improved my visualization became sharper and I could recall games played years ago. My advice to you is to have the games notated and not just read, but play through them ...
15
Here is another decisive game where neither queen moved:
[FEN ""]
[Event "36th Olympiad"]
[Site "Calvia ESP"]
[Date "2004.10.17"]
[EventDate "2004.10.15"]
[Round "2"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Alexander Morozevich"]
[Black "Viktor Korchnoi"]
[ECO "C77"]
[WhiteElo "2758"]
[BlackElo "2601"]
[PlyCount "25"]
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. d3 b5 6. ...
14
Yes, many times. Ivanchuk- Kamsky 2009 is one example, but there are hundreds if not thousands of others. Ushenina - Girya 2013 made some news recently because Ushenina couldn't mate with knight and bishop in time.
14
I just happened to be reviewing the 2013 World Championship match a few days ago and asked myself a similar question because in round 9 Carlsen won without moving his queen or bishop.
Anand vs Carlsen - Round 9:
[FEN ""]
[Event "Anand - Carlsen World Championship Match"]
[Site "Chennai IND"]
[Date "2013.11.21"]
[...
11
It won't be terribly common, but it's not unheard of either. Here are a few examples involving well-known grandmasters:
Ivanchuk-Csom (1989):
[fen ""]
[Event "Yerevan"]
[Site "Yerevan"]
[Date "1989.??.??"]
[EventDate "?"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Vassily Ivanchuk"]
[Black "Istvan Csom"]
[ECO "E20"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]
[PlyCount "49"]
1....
11
This is a relatively long one (37 moves) with the white queen keeping on d1 during the whole game.
[FEN ""]
[Event "Belgrade Invest"]
[Site "Belgrade"]
[Date "1991.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Damljanovic, Branko"]
[Black "Kamsky, Gata"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "2585"]
[BlackElo "2595"]
[ECO "A09"]
[EventDate "1991.11.??"]
[PlyCount "73"]
[EventType "tourn"]...
11
So forget about Stockfish, forget about Kasparov, forget about GMs.
You are 1850. You understand something about the game. Not everything will be correct, some of it will be.
Start analyzing. It can be your own games, it can be any old game, it can be a random diagram you saw in the newspaper.
Set up the position, and try to figure out what is going on. ...
10
The white player is about to lose the Queen. Does that alone immediately constitute as a loss in that level of Chess play?
Well, no. The problem with White position is that he lacks any real counterplay. He has weaknesses he can not defend in the long run, especially pawn at a2, and his piece coordination is not good enough to defend against the might of ...
answered Sep 21 '15 at 21:44
AlwaysLearningNewStuff
11.4k2 gold badges24 silver badges55 bronze badges
10
After reading a bunch of open source code, I just found out that most of them are relying on Chesspresso which is a solid Java Chess library that can handle move validation, PGN parser (what I was looking for), chessboard renderering, etc.
The code is well-documented and easy to understand. It took me around 30 minutes to read the code and start testing. ...
10
Your statement, Grandmasters think of next many moves ... is a bit misleading for your question.
Grandmaster are able to calculate many moves ahead, but this is not something they do at each and every move. Basically, as for the start of the game, the first 10 or 20 moves are played from memory (known opening repertoire + home preparation) and not found ...
10
As was stated in the answer to this post made by D M, one idea of capturing in this manner is to open up the g-file for white's rooks to attack black's king. In the game this proved to be a very potent idea, and in general it's a good idea to open up lines for one's rooks against the enemy king if one intends to attack it.
But there is another point to ...
10
It is simply not as solid as other openings, mostly because it cedes too much space, and especially with the advent of computers: White has simply found more ways to press black.
In a 2017 interview, Magnus Carlsen did not think too highly of it.
"If he had wanted a worse position, he would have played the King’s Indian," Carlsen said.
Nevertheless, it ...
9
Sorry it is not an answer to the original question. It is supposed to be a comment to StudetT's answer - definitely correct one - but is too long to fit the comment format. Just a bit of chess history.
Dizziness due to success was not coined by Kotov.
It is a title a Pravda editorial, signed by Stalin (I have no idea who actually wrote it), published in ...
9
But at what point was game not saveable, at what point did Akobian
make a (big) mistake?
Qxf2 is a big mistake as after that it is forced mate in 7 moves. If So had played 24. Bxf6 there is no defense against all the mate threads and all black can do is prolong his suffering by throwing in some pieces.
[FEN ""]
[Event "US Chess Championships"]
[White "...
9
If you're a beginner then studying games from the old masters does more good, especially players like Morphy who emphasized the basics (quick development, attacking an uncastled king, etc). Once you get to the 1500 range, you'd do best looking at games from the GMs of the 20th century up until the 1990s. That was when classical chess theory "matured", so to ...
9
The game Dann-Kovchan ended with 217...Nc2#.
[Title "Matthias Dann-Alexander Kovchan, Dresden Open, Dredsen Germany, 4/8/17"]
[FEN ""]
[startply "433"]
1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Be3 Ng4 7. Bg5 h6 8. Bh4 g5 9. Bg3 Bg7 10. Qd2 Nc6 11. Nb3 b5 12. h4 gxh4 13. Rxh4 Nge5 14. Nd5 Ng6 15. Rh1 Bxb2 16. Rd1 ...
9
A beautiful, more recent, game between Svilder and Carlsen:
[Title "Svidler - Carlsen, GRENKE Chess Classic, 2019"]
[FEN ""]
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 e5 4.Bc4 Be7 5.d3 d6 6.Nd2 Nf6 7.Nf1 Nd7 8.Nd5 Nb6 9.Nxb6 axb6 10.c3 O-O 11.Ne3 Bg5 12.O-O Kh8 13.a3 f5 14.Nxf5 Bxc1 15.Rxc1 Bxf5 16.exf5 d5 17.Ba2 Rxf5 18.Qg4 Rf6 19.f4 exf4 20.Qg5 Qf8 21.Qxd5 Rd8 22.Qf3 Ne5 ...
8
How? Yourself :-)
This should not discourage you from getting the help of an engine - afterwards §. Also, to me it seems critical to what end you are analyzing master games. There are many answers to this question, almost as many as masters. You analyze a Morphy game? Great choice, learn how opening sins (especially underdevelopment) are punished mercylessly....
7
I am an active member on online chess server http://www.chessfriends.com. I played there more than 5800 games. My stats as white are exactly same as black. I prefer playing 1 minute games, but sometimes I play 3 minute or 5 minute games. My experience is, that playing bullet or blitz games improve my tactics skills a lot. I have 2300 Fide rating, and I am ...
7
This question can be answered from the angle of computer chess as well, when it might actually be more illustrative. The shortest decisive game ever played in the unofficial World Computer Chess Championship is this 20-move victory by Arasan over AllieStein. Computers report their depths, e.g. on move 16 AllieStein had a depth/selective depth of 38/54 - ...
7
Pretty much all great players studied the games of the best players of the past, and it is repeatedly recommended that studying them is a great way to improve. Marin's book Learn from the Legends is pretty much based around his journey of doing that.
6
It really depends on where your skill level is at. If you play rated Federation chess or happen to be buzzing around your favorite online server, you'd probably fall into a rating class or have a rating that serves as a great predictor of your skill/strength level.
With that being said, here's a category-based answer to your question (using the USCF ...
6
This question seems to have been answered by TD in ChessPub Forum. I post the answer below:
[fen ""]
[Date "1996"]
[Round "?"]
[White "De Groot, Adrianus Dingeman"]
[Black "Simmelink, Joop Theo"]
[Source "ChessBase"]
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 Nc6 3. Nc3 e5 4. d5 Ne7 5. h4 Neg8 6. a3 a6 7. Nf3 Ng4 8. Ng5 f5 9. Qc2 Bc5 10. e3 Ne7 11. Be2 Nf6 12. b4 Ba7 13. Bb2 h6 14. ...
6
The Indian theme appeared in a game between Rudolf Spielmann and Siegbert Tarrasch (San Sebastián, 1912):
[FEN "..."]
[Event "San Sebastian"]
[Site "San Sebastian ESP"]
[Date "1912.03.12"]
[EventDate "1912.02.19"]
[Round "17"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Rudolf Spielmann"]
[Black "Siegbert Tarrasch"]
[ECO "C80"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]
[PlyCount "82"]
1. ...
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