Unlock Your Genius August 2009 (Problems)

by dlwyatt, Ohio, Friday, September 11, 2009, 12:41 (5696 days ago) @ Tony Kosten

?
? Here are the next few moves to give you an idea of what happened:
?
? 14... Nfd5 (14... Ned5 15. f5) 15. Ne4 Qd7 16. Rac1 Nf5 17. Qe2
? Nd6 18. Ng5 f6 19. Nf3 a5 20. Rfe1 Rfe8 21. Qc2 a4 22. Qc6 Qxc6 23. Rxc6
? Kf7 24. Bd2 Ra7 25. g4 Ke7 26. Rc2 Kd7 27. Kh1 b5 28. Rc5 c6 29. g5 Nc4
? 30. Bc1 Kd6 31. Nd2 Nxd2 32. Bxd2
?
? Any thoughts? What next?

Every move you made seemed perfectly logical to me, and none of the reasons that I preferred black's position originally have changed much. The only possible improvement I managed to spot was right at the end, where you played 30... Kd6. I think White's situation improved quite a bit when he was able to play Nd2 and trade off your strong c4 knight. If your king were not on d6, that would have been prevented due to the tactical reply Nxf4 (with the Nd3 fork threatened, so he can't capture on c4. With the king on d6, Nxc4 would be check). Even Na5 would be a strong reply to Nd2, if your king weren't in d6 allowing Ne4 with check (ready to drop in to b3 at some point, and possibly exchanging off for the bishop on c1 in order to win the weak f4 pawn).

So, if I'm right and we assume Kd6 was a slight mistake, the question would be, what's a constructive plan? You've firmly fixed white's queenside pawns, you're constantly making sure that he can't unravel the position a bit with Nd2, but then what? And at the same time, what can white try to do from here? Those questions, I'm not so sure about.

The worst piece Black has right now is obviously the a7 rook, but I'm not sure yet what to do about it. Some ideas I have looked at are Raa8-d8, followed by Kc7 and maybe Ne7-f5 (pressure d4), Raa8 followed by h6 (open a kingside file, but this gets rid of white's weak f4 pawn, which is probably not a good trade), or Kc7-b6 followed by moving the a7 rook somewhere along the 7th (possibly d7 with similar plans as when it was on d8). I'm not sure any of those ideas is correct or enough to progress the position yet.

For white's part, I mainly looked at either advancing the h-pawn to h5, or walking the king out to g3/g4. Other than that, unless Black allows Nd2 without consequences, I didn't see much white could accomplish.

I'll look at it some more later.