Monday, July 22, 2019

Szabo Gives A Lesson On Connected Passed Pawns

     Ever since I saw the following game that was played between Gligoric and Szabo in the 10th Olympiad at Helsinki in 1952, it has been a source of fascination. 
     Most players learn early on about the might of united passed Pawns.  Although they also can have their disadvantages, for the one possessing the united passed Pawns it is important to be sure that they cannot be blockaded, so as a rule, the Ps should advance together. i.e. before advancing one of them the advance of the second Pawn needs to be assured. 
     In the following game Gligoric came out of the opening with two connected passed Pawns and his position looked extremely promising, but they were blockaded and never advanced. 
     Pachman’s analysis in Modern Chess Strategy always lead me to believe that it was due to Szabo’s great positional understanding and that Gligoric was positionally lost coming out of the opening. But, as is often the case, when you let modern chess engines take a nice long look at the game, you get a different picture. 
     Stockfish’s analysis indicates that white was not strategically lost from the beginning as suggested by Pachman. In fact, in 1985 the Argentine-Italian GM Carlos Garcia Palermo (born December 2, 1953) repeated the whole line up to move 18 where he found an improvement and went on to win. A year later Polish IM Krzysztof Panczyk also played the same line and he, too, managed to win. 
     Does this mean Pachman’s analysis was worthless. Absolutely not! Pachman was illustrating ideas and that’s what’s important in a book on strategy. 
     See the brief discussion on two united passed Pawns on pages 106-108 in The Logical Approach to Chess by Euwe, Blaine and Rumble HERE
     Everybody knows about Gligoric, but Hungary’s Laszlo Szabo (March 19, 1917 – August 8, 1998), a banker by profession, is under-appreciated today. Noted for his aggressive style of play, he startled everyone when he won the 1935 Hungarian Championship at the age of 18, which at that time was considered a remarkable feat; he would go one to win it a total of 9 times. 
Szabo
     At the outbreak of WW2 he was attached to a Forced Labor Unit and later captured by Russian troops who held him as a Prisoner of War. After the war, he returned to chess and played in many major international events and in the post-WW2 era he was also one of the best players in the world. 
     In 1986 Pergamon published My Best Games of Chess by Szabo, but it’ a rare. Szabo himself thought his best agme was against Vasja Pirc at Hastings 1938-39. GM Matthew Sadler analyzed the game HERE.  
     Helsinki was organized by the FIDE as an open team tournament designed to promote chess and took place between August 9 and August 31, 1952. The Olympiad was especially notable for the debut of the Soviet team, who won their first gold medal and went on to completely dominate the Olympiads for the next four decades. In the finals they scored +5 -0 =3 as a team.
     After the tournament, it was generally agreed that the small preliminary and final groups of only 8–9 teams left too much open to chance, since a single blunder would have too big an impact on the final standings. Consequently, FIDE decided that in the future, no final should have less than 12 participants.
     Twenty-five teams entered and were divided into three preliminary groups of eight or nine teams. The top three from each group advanced to Final A. 

Finals: 
1) Soviet Union (Keres, Smyslov, Bronstein, Geller, Boleslavsky, Kotov) 21.0 
2) Argentina (Najdorf, Julio Bolbochán, Eliskases, Pilnik, Rossetto) 19.5 
3) Yugoslavia (Gligoric, Rabar, Trifunovic, Pirc, Fuderer, Milic) 19.0 
4) Czechoslovakia (Filip, Pachman, Šajtar, Kottnauer, Zíta, Pithart) 18.0 
5) United States (Reshevsky, Evans, Robert Byrne, Bisguier, Koltanowski, Berliner) 17.0
6) Hungary (Szabo, Barcza, Szily, Florian, Pogats, Molnar) 16.0 
7) Sweden Stahberg, Stoltz, Lundin, Skold, Johansson, Danielsson) 
8) West Germany (eschner, Schmid, Pfeiffer, Heinicke, Lange, Rellstab) 10.5 
9) Finland (Book, Ojanen, Kaila, Salo, Fred, Niemela) 10.0 

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