Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Teeny Tiny Positional Errors


    I posted an attacking game by Flohr a few years ago and recently ran across the following game that shows what kind of chess he played in his heyday, the late 1920s and early 1930s. At one time he was considered a serious contender to challenge Alekhine for the World Championship, but by the mid-1930s the flawless yet aggressive positional play was gone. Even then, Chessmetrics places him among the world's top 20 players from 1930 to 1951.  Czech GM Vlastimil Hort, who knew Flohr, did a tribute on Chessbase HERE.
     The following game, played against Rafael Domenech in a tournament in Rosas Spain in 1935, was brilliant enough that Irving Chernev included it in his book The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played. I don't have Chernev's book so can't compare notes. 
Flohr at Barcelona in 1935.  Today's players would object to the crowding!

    Unfortunately I was unable to find any information on the tournament or Flohr's opponent. Little seems to be known of Domenech except that in the 1930s he was a regular contributor to the magazine Els Escacs a Catalunya (Chess in Catalonia). All the databases I consulted show white resigning after 30...Kd6, but Edward Winter discovered that the game continued 31 c5+ Kxc5 and according to Flohr in his notes to the game that appeared in El Ajedrez Espanol in July, 1935, “White resigned a few moves later.”

     Domenech's doesn't make any tactical blunders, only tiny positional errors, but that's all it takes to lose to a world-class player.

1 comment:

  1. I played this over this game many(!) years ago, using Chernev's book. After seeing Black's little maneuvers on moves 24-27 I remember thinking "Oh, this is what they mean when they say 'technique'"

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