[chessmind] Dennis Monokroussos: This Week's ChessBase Show: Kan-Capablanca, or How to win a little at a time

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Posted by Dennis Monokroussos:
This Week's ChessBase Show: Kan-Capablanca, or How to win a little at a time
http://chessmind.powerblogs.com/posts/1214344079.shtml


   The great Cuban world chess champion, Jose Raoul Capablanca, was
   renowned for his endgame technique, and rightly so. Like every other
   player, he committed the occasional lapse in the final phase of the
   game, but overall he gained many, many more half points in the ending
   than he lost. Indeed, his endgame technique was so good that it helped
   lead to the sobriquet "The Chess Machine". As developing players, all
   of us can learn a lot from a careful examination of Capablanca's
   endgame play, and this week's ChessBase show is offered as a step in
   that direction.
   Our game is from Moscow 1936, a major double round-robin event won by
   Capablanca ahead of (then-) future world champion Mikhail Botvinnik
   and a number of other stars including Salo Flohr, former world
   champion Emanuel Lasker and the still-living [1]Andor Lilienthal.
   Another participant was the strong Soviet master [2]Ilya Kan, best
   known today as the founding father of the eponymous variation of the
   Sicilian Defense (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 a6). While not in
   Capablanca's class, Kan was a respectable player in his own right, and
   managed to defeat the third-placed Flohr 1.5-.5 in the event and split
   a pair of games with Lasker. He also drew his first game with
   Capablanca - with Black, no less - and so with White the second time
   around it would seem he had reasonable chances to split their match.
   Nothing about the opening suggested he'd have any difficulties in this
   regard. The players traded pieces as if they had prearranged a draw
   and wanted to make it look good for the audience. Yet despite reaching
   a double rook ending by move 23, the game was not yet drawn. While
   best play would surely result in a drawn outcome, Capablanca possessed
   a number of very small advantages. The difficulty for Kan was twofold:
   first, he was probably psychologically unprepared to fight for a draw,
   and may have just hoped it would fall into his lap with "normal",
   "good" moves. Second, there wasn't any way for him to force a draw.
   Capablanca could do this and that, improving his position on one side
   of the board, then the other side, and Kan needed to react - sometimes
   prophylactically, but sometimes with activity of his own. In short,
   Capablanca's position still had play, and Kan still had enough rope to
   hang himself.
   The game is a model in several respects. "Capa" illustrates how to
   utilize a small advantage from both the practical and the
   psychological point of view. Conversely, we can learn from Kan's
   errors how to better prepare ourselves for a long defense. And
   concretely, there are various techniques Capablanca uses that we can
   adopt: play on both wings, using the minority attack in the endgame,
   the proper timing of pawn breaks, combining horizontal and vertical
   attacking ideas with rooks, and more. It's a beautiful game by one of
   chess's all-time greats, and you can watch it, live and for free, on
   ChessBase's Playchess.com server tomorrow (Wednesday) night at 9 p.m.
   ET. Directions for watching the show are [3]here.
   Hope to see you then!

References

   1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andor_Lilienthal
   2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Kan
   3. http://chessmind.powerblogs.com/posts/1114234449.shtml