Thursday, March 08, 2007

White to play - how did the game go?

The answer to yesterday's puzzle: the game is Cafolla - S. Williams, Bunratty 2007. My source is the daily chess newspaper Chess Today for Saturday 3 March.

The diagram position was reached after the following moves: 1.d4 g6 [no Dutch then? - ejh] 2.c4 Bg7 3.Nc3 d6 4.e4 a6 5.Nf3 c6 6.b4 b5 7.Bb2 Bg4 8.Be2 Nd7 9.c5 dxc5 10.dxc5 Qc7


Clearly there a couple of easy wins for White here but White chose to play instead 11.h3 Bxf3 12.Bxf3 Nf8 and then agree a draw (although of course the win is still available). The explanation according to Chess Today is that they wished to watch the rugby union international between Ireland and England. Bizarre.

I mean I could understand if it had been rugby league.

4 comments:

Tom Chivers said...

You sort of assume the game might have been over even quicker had white played Nxb5!

Robert Pearson said...

A draw?!?! That's a Chess Crime. I solved it a lot faster than the Smullyan puzzle below, anyway!

Anonymous said...

I'm ashamed to say I failed to see the winning move - although I agree it's really obvious.

:-(

Anonymous said...

The only problem with the official 'explanation' is that this game was played on Sunday morning...which eliminates the rugby, but brings another obvious explanation into play (particularly obvious to anyone who's ever played Bunratty...)