A beautiful variation behind the scenes of a Mikhail Tal game

Hi all

The following Tal game is very beautiful:

And also I had some extra delights when analysing the game with the latest Stockfish. It turns out that after 17...h6

Even though Black seems to have played very "classical" and dutifully blockaded White's Isolated Queen's pawn, the position for black is not actually that "solid". It turns out Bxh6 was immediately possible:

The (rather subtle) point being that after gxh6 Qd2!

And let us continue with say Qb4 Rg3+ then:

GUESS THE MOVE IN THE ABOVE POSITION!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
V

White has the stunner Qxh6+

These sorts of moves get me excited!

There is a beautiful sequence or two to follow from this Queen sacrifice. It could end up like this:

which shows great cooperation in the Queen's absence between Knight Bishop, Rook, and pawns to checkmate the King :)

It is amazing what you can discover "Behind the scenes" of a game - even a brilliant one. Perhaps it is in the nature of the position, that in general rook lifts in Isolated Queen's Pawn positions do offer White a great deal of dynamic play. So the dynamic scene set has some hidden treasures quite often that the engines can easily pick up!

Takeaway points

• Playing with an Isolated Queen's Pawn (IQP) can give very exciting possibilities
• A rook lift can be really dangerous!
• Look out for forcing moves - even Queen sacrifices. It doesn't really matter how outrageous they seem to be, they need to be followed up for investigation!
• A solid position has to be "functionally solid" not just "solid in appearance". To test if a position is functionally solid, you have to throw out some crazy ideas and moves to test solidity. Tal later found the cracking Bishop sacrifice and it turns out it could have been played earlier as well to expose the lack of actual solidity of the black position.

Hope you enjoyed this blog :). Any likes and follows are really appreciated. Also, I also have some interesting chess courses at https://kingscrusher.tv/chesscourses to check out.

Cheers, K