Once again, I haven’t blogged for a while, but recently I’ve actually been spending more time on chess than normal. Why? The USCL season starts the first week of September and then I have the Imre Konig Memorial towards the end of September. It’s also now been about 2 years since I last played a tournament game …
I’ve been playing over some annotated GM games and double-checking some opening lines. While doing that, I came across a sequence that looked pretty incredible to me:
(FEN: r3k2r/pp6/2p2pp1/2b1n1p1/Pq2Q2P/4N1P1/1P1RPP2/2KN3R w kq - 0 23)
This is from a game earlier this summer between IM Ashwin Jayaram and GM Tigran Petrosian, where Petrosian just played 22…Qb4. Before realizing something was afoot, I had already breezed through the next few moves, so it’s hard to say what I would have done here myself. But 23.hxg5! makes a nice impression either way. It’s not hard to see ahead to 23…Qxe4 24.Rxh8+ Bf8.
There and Back Again 