Wednesday 5 December 2012

Wild times

Round 4 of the 2012 London Chess Classic saw two pretty wild games. Aronian v McShane saw some bizarre material imbalances, with Aronian having 2 queens(!) v Rook and 2 knights (one of which was as a result of an underpromotion). Eventually Aronian was able to break the coordination between McShane's pieces and win. In Carlsen v Jones, Jones sacrificed his queen for 2 pieces and a lot of board control, but a shortage of time meant he was not able to find the absolute best moves, and eventually Carlsen made the material advantage count.
However I am not going to show either of those games. Instead I'm going to dig into the archives and present   a similarly wild game from 1904. It was from the Cambridge Spring tournament, and was played between Lasker and Napier. In one of my early chess books, this was given as an example of creative, and yet, slightly unsound chess. Lasker took more than a few liberties in the opening, while Napier missed a couple of opportunities  to finish him off. Apparently after the game Lasker described it as "Napier's brilliancy, which I happened to win"


Lasker,Emanuel - Napier,William Ewart [B34]
Cambridge Springs Cambridge Springs (3), 1904



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