I was editor of CFC Bulletin which for various reasons had to become Chess Canada Échecs from issues 34 (1979) through 61 (1983). The early magazine issues were typed with an IBM Selectric, so no digital version ever existed. By the time of issues 53 and 54, I had shifted to digital typesetting using a Quasar Data Products S-100 CP/M computer with 64K RAM and two DSDD 8" floppy drives, outputting to a daisy wheel printer. This article was left over and it was time to get it in print!
Diagram 1 is correct
Diagram 2 and Diagram 3, as noted late in the text, are incorrect. The Kings at g1 should be on h1.
Diagram 3 may be incorrect on another count, the positioning of
Black's bishops. The game score shows 25...Be8, as appears in
Chess Informant 27, page 150, game 420. That was Rob
Morrison's source for the game. However, two other sources give the
move as 25...Bc5. Chess Assistant's Hugebase could easily be
dismissed, as databases are more likely to contain errors than the
original sources. And what is the original source? In Chess
Informant, the game is listed as being played in SSSR, 1978, but
Chess Assistant gives more precision: Daugavpils, Soviet
Championship, round 1. Looking up the Soviet Championships in the
Soviet Chess Encyclopedia, we find that 1978 was the year of
the 46th USSR Championship, for which Daugavpils, the capital of
Lithuania, was a 64-player Otborochny or qualification tournament
most famous for the ascension of 15-year-old Garry Kasparov to the
Soviet Finals (Higher League) for the first time. His score of 9-4
was matched by Uzbekistan champion Igor Ivanov, who was relegated to
the Soviet First League by virtue of Kasparov's better
Buchholz tiebreak. Ivanov later defected to Canada. The Soviet
Encyclopedia conveniently gives the dates of Daugavpils as 27.06 to
16.07, and looking in the appropriate issues of 64
(never
throw anything away) we find in issue 28, pages 8-9, the exact game,
with brief notes by Gufeld and Nesis, and the move in question being
25...Bc5. So it's two-to-one against the Informant version being
correct. Well, in handwriting, e can look like c, and
an 8 is like a 5 with an extra stroke. So my theory is
that White wrote out his annotations for Chess Informant longhand.
Democracy has no place in chess, what are the objective values of the
two moves? According to a few minutes with Fritz 4, both moves
should lead to a draw. One way we might find out is by asking the
players, who in the FIDE rating list
are:
14602385 Mihalcisin, Adrian g SLO 2522 13 18.11.54 14100347 Taborov, Boris UKR 2446 0 05.06.60
Diagram 4 is correct, taking into account the discussion of Black's 25th move in the paragraph above. Its K correctly stands on h1. However, the caption of White to move is trivially incorrect, as Black is in check!
The most important analytical point is that after Rob Morrison's 27. or 29.Re7, Black can force White to go for a draw with the ever-so-calm 27...Qa5! 28.Re3 Bd7 29.Rh6+. The incursion of the Q at e1 keeps White just enough off balance so that he cannot complete the slow manœuvre of a mating attack. Thanks to Fritz 4 for this insight.
URL: This web page is: http://members.shaw.ca/berry5868/fermovn.htm Last modified April 11, 2005