Perfect Game and Twin Game
Submitted by
on Sat, 07/11/2009 at 7:25pm.
This week, I want to share a chess game with my friends that is just as rare as a pawn mate, the game that I analyzed last week. This week, I want to analyze a "Perfect Game" that is the first one that I have played at Chess.com. First, I want to define a "Perfect Chess Game" according to an article that was published in Chess Life back in the 1970's:
A perfect chess game is one in which one side mates or gains a winning position over the opponent and each move of the winning side stands up to Grandmaster analysis as being unsurpassed in strength, i.e. as strong as any possible move after the defining opening variation position is reached.
I have played 9 previous perfect games out of the thousands of rated games that I have played over the last 35 years. Most of these were fairly quick mates, some of them following a prepared line that I had developed after post-mortem analysis of a previous game. Here the Grandmaster analysis to verify my perfect game is provided by the Chess.com computer set at the 2500 level.
The second concept that I want to discuss called "twinning" was introduced in a Chess Life article about twin games where an A-player defeated a master in a tourney by following a line from the famous Nottingham Tounament of the 1930's. His master opponent was unfamiliar with the Nottingham game and followed the moves of the losing player right up until the point of resignation! This spectacular game was originally played by a GM, of course, but the A-player had been studying it and lucked out against the hapless master. Twin games are also very rare because of the modern use of databases, but they still occur in OTB tournaments. They also occur at Chess.com because the database for each opponent only contains their completed games!
This game, started in July of 2008, was played at 14 days per move and a second game, started on Feb.28, in a team match played at 3 days per move caught up to the first game at move 20 in early May. I was winning both games at that time, so I continued to play the same line in both games. Adrian deliberately follows the international team game that we were playing at 3 days per move since that game was much further along after May 9. When he saw in early July that the team match game was lost, he tried to divert his play and blundered at move 23. When he saw that his slip gave white an extra pawn, he resigned immediately on July 4. Later he resigned the team match game on July 7.
Enough said, the following Ruy Lopez game is both a perfect game and a twin game and it gave me the championship of my section in The Strongest Tournament Ever! Enjoy!
| 1021 reads | 8 comments