Spanish Gold: The Other Side of the Coin
Submitted by
on Fri, 07/25/2008 at 6:19am.
In choosing games for my recent Spanish post (Duke of Plaza Toro) I selected a group of brevities won by Black, basically because I never play the white side of the Lopez. No doubt this would have been disappointing for all the Spanish aficionados out there so here are a few more in which White showed just how quickly he can win.
By the way, the coin pictured is an eight escudo piece—a Spanish doubloon.
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When Robert Herrick wrote, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” he was advising young maidens to snare a husband while they still had their beauty. In the first game Mr Breitenbach must have thought it was advice to pinch pawns—a definite No-No until you're developed. Even more inexplicably this was a correspondence game and lasted a mere ten moves.
In the next game no less a player than Jan Timman botched a Berlin Defence against John Van Der Wiel at Tilburg in 1988. The play is analogous to the hell-fire preacher who proclaimed, “There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth!” When an old lady said, “I ain't got no teeth,” he replied, “Teeth will be provided.” Van Der Wiel provided the teeth for this attack. He manoeuvred Timman's knight and bishop into position so that a double attack must win one or the other.
Here's a Marshall Attack from Calcutta in 1999 in which Sergey Dolmatov made short work of IM Anup Deshmukh. 18...Bf4 was a blunder and after Dolmatov's 19. Re8 there was no defence that could save both mate and the bishop. Deshmukh's decision to save the bishop is no indication that he couldn't see White's next move, but that there wasn't much point trying to play on, a piece down, against somebody of Dolmatov's calibre.
Here's a great way to lose a piece in a hurry. It was played at the Thessalonika Olympiad in 1988 and Jamaican Orrin Tonsingh got the better of H. Abbou from Algeria. Abbou (may his tribe increase) played on to move 39 by which time he had a very lonely rook trying to do battle with three minor pieces—but really, the game was all over by move 14.
“Castle early and often” is tongue-in-cheek advice given to all new chess players—but before you do take a good look at the board. Are all your pieces protected? They are. Or are they? Black's 10...O-O gets a question mark here because after a couple of exchanges he found himself a piece behind. Appropriately this last game in the collection of Spanish brevities was played in Spain (Aoiz – Fernandez, St. Cugat 1994).