Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Charity -- the BEST Kind


NN vs. BlueEyedRook
05/08/06
White to Move


I thought this was a clearly drawn situation. Yes, white is a whole piece ahead of me, but the cruelest reality of chess is that two knights can never score a mate. Thus, as long as I can keep the white pawn from queening, I should be just fine. Since my g4-bishop is nestled snuggly (i.e., the king can't take it). I thought this game was done. If the pawn ever queened, I would simply take it with the bishop and the game would be a draw with insufficient mating material.
Luckily, my opponent thought the exact same thing and offered me a draw which I accepted.


We were both completey wrong!


1. Nd6+!! wins the game. The key I (and obviously my opponent) missed is that the white king has only one square to retreat to: d7. This is a huge problem because this blocks the black bishop from guarding the queening pawn. 1... Kd7 is followed by the inevitable 2. c8=Q+. The black king can't capture the pawn since it is now being guarded by the pesky d6 knight. 2... Kxd6 gives black some comfort (that awful knight is gone), but it has done its damage: a knight vs. queen endgame where black is inevitably doomed.

2 Comments:

At 10:28 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

That's pretty hard to see! (at least for me)
Nice escape

 
At 6:14 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi BlueEyedRook, I was surfing around some chess blogs and I found your site. It looks pretty cool! I see you're in the DC area, too. Every play chess at Dupont Circle?

I noticed you have lots of chess diagrams on your blog. I recently put up an online tool that lets people create chess diagrams online:

http://chessup.net

I'm looking to get some feedback on it. Note that you can set the board size to large or small, and also add some text details to it.

 

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