Saturday, November 6, 2010

Knight Outposts

Reading Kramnik’s statement about Smyslov when he said, “I would recommend a study of Smyslov's games to children who want to know how to play chess because he plays the game how it should be played: his style is the closest to some sort of 'virtual truth' in chess. He always tried to make the strongest move in each position. He has surpassed many other of the World Champions in the number of strongest moves made.” brought to mind the game Smyslov-Rudakowski, Moscow, 1945, where Smyslov played an almost perfect example of how to take advantage of a N outpost and his opponent’s backward P and the struggle of a N vs. B

In the post I did on TrueChess the author did a computer analysis of the play of great players in an effort to determine the best. His criteria was "blunders per 1000 moves.” Surprisingly, Smyslov came in ranked at #1 with 4.03, so perhaps Kramnik’s assessment is correct.

Play over the following game and watch how effortlessly Smyslov makes things look.

1 comment:

  1. Kramnik's advice is a must.

    Great N outpost and N vs B fighting example, very nice game.

    I'd like to see more, please post one game of every chess player Kramnik quotes on the interview.

    What about the next being Mikhail Tal ?

    And keep up this great work.

    tks

    ReplyDelete