28 February 2021

The Only Move

This position arose in the eleventh match game between Frank Marshall and Jose R. Capablanca in 1909.

White to move

Marshall played 29.h4, which looks sensible to me. Black still has a difficult position to defend. However, Black's defensive resources are adequate to the defense and White is lost after this move.

In My Chess Career (1920) Capablanca wrote, "White misses his chance here" (39), offering a move that I doubt I could have seen on my own after hours of looking at the board. Nonetheless, I spent five minutes going through Capablanca's annotations and other suggestions on the ChessBase DVD, Master Class 4: Jose Raul Capablanca (2015), which I reviewed in "Building a Lesson".

Komodo 13 needed half a minute to see that White had a draw, While Stockfish 11 found the idea instantly.

With some basic patterns from these annotations, I was able to draw Komodo 13 from White's position in about fifty moves. I think I used three takebacks after inaccuracies.

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