Ivanchuk's classics by Krasenkow ( Prochess diaries)

 After a month, it so happened that again I could attend another Krasenkow's lecture on Ivanchuk. This time he looked two games of Ivanchuk in contrasting styles, one a positional build up ending up in a complex endgame and the other a famous attacking masterpiece.

The first game was Ivanchuk's victory over Azmaiparashvilli from 2002. I had not seen this game earlier, and that gave a greater freshness in approaching the position. Like last time I will offer a few interesting moments from the lecture with the explanatory ideas. Without further ado let us jump into the positions.

At this moment I expected a normal move like Ke2, however Ivanchuk came with 19Kd2!? which was quite clever in terms of timing. White understood that Black wants to stop further expansion of White's Queenside pawns, so the last move b7-b6 signaled an idea of a7-a5 and preempting this Ivanchuk decide to take his King for a walk along the light squares. Also pay attention to the fact that despite a blocked central position (closed one) here the Bishop is a better piece than the knight, because Black knights lacks any meaningful squares/ outposts and White's Bishop works well in unison with his pawn structure.

Travelling further into the game we reach this position after Black's 30th move. White's king maneuver via the light squares reminded me of a game Petrosian-Lokvenc 1953 from a Kings Indian. Here Ivanchuk continued with 31.h4! and as rightly pointed out by Grandmaster Krasenkow in such positions one needs to create a second target of attack or a weakness, one cannot win by attacking one weakness alone ( in this case c7)

This was perhaps a very important critical moment in the game, here Krasenkow gave us some time to come with our decision, I decided on the forcing 33Rf2+ Ke4 34Bxb6 Ng4 35Rg2 and this was exactly what happened in the game. Interestingly at this moment neither Ivanchuk in Chess Informant or Ribli in Mega Database consider any other alternatives. Here Krasenkow suggested 33.h6! Ng4 34.Bc1 Nh6 35.Rh2 with a sort of a zugzwang and also commented that , "an attractive move need not always be right a simpler move might suffice"

This is perhaps the decisive moment of the game. Black needs to decide the placement of his King on this move or on the next one after say e5-e4, here Azmai chose Kd4 intending to hit at White's c4 pawn. But this proves to be too slow to generate any sort of meaningful counterplay. In Rook endgames usually the defensive side should aim for counterplay by activating his own passed pawn and Black's King needs to be on d2 to support the passed e-pawn, so either here or on the next move after e5-e4 Black should have played his King to d2. Krasenkow showed some further lines on how this would have been sufficient for a draw. This moment was missed by earlier annotators and so White's earlier decisions were all deemed to be right. This shows how complex the rook endgames are, even for the best of the best! Retrospectively if this is a draw, the previous diagram also becomes important in the eternal search for the truth! Anyways a wonderful instructive moment and a game in totality. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would invest further time to unearth the hidden gems from this particular game.

Next up was Ivanchuk's brilliant win as Black over Topalov from Linares 1999. This game has a lot of wonderful moments too and some very pretty variations. But as a teaser I will just provide 2 gorgeous decisions of Ivanchuk.

Black has a lead in development and he needs to do something dynamic and immediate to keep up the pressure. There are a lot of choices, but Ivanchuk chose 14...e4!! and never took his feet off the accelerator for the rest of the game.

Here he rang the death knell for the opponent's monarch with 18....Ne2!! and White's King wandered in the centre for the rest of the game but ultimately could not save himself. A game in a wonderful romantic spirit of yesteryears - the golden age of Morphy and co come to mind. I would urge everyone to check out these two masterpieces of Ivanchuk and enrich their armoury of chess ideas!