Sunday, June 26, 2011

Too Many Good Choices

Black to play: what are the best options?
I have annotated the game Tomkovich - Goeller, KCC Summer Tournament 2011, which illustrates the problem of having too many good choices, especially at Game-60 with no time delay.  In the diagrammed position above, it is Black to play after 7.c4?  What are the best options?  And how do you decide which to choose?

1 comment:

katar said...

Your perfectionistic nature as an academic/scholar shines thru in this game. I find it telling that your intuition did not fail you (7...f6) but your deliberate calculation did.

A sporting or pragmatic player would have approached (and annotated!) the game differently. Particularly ironic is your comment that "White should have used more time(!) to spot a promising tactic", since it was precisely White's abundance of time and intuitive approach that decided the game in his favor.

I've always liked this quote: "The fact that a player is very short of time is to my mind, as little to be considered as an excuse as, for instance, the statement of the law-breaker that he was drunk at the time he committed the crime." quote attributed to Alekhine!

I am personally a relatively weak player for my rating but i feel my competitive edge (clock control, steady nerves) fully compensates! Anyway, as always, anything you publish on chess is a treasure for your audience. Thanks.