Lesson of the Week

Pawn Basics: Breakthrough

I plan to work on some pawn basics with young chess players this week. The position below is well known. Young players who have not yet learned it must do so.

White to move


White wins easily by giving up two pawns in order to promote the other.

The second position is less difficult.

White to move


The third position gets into the heart of the matter, but remains elementary.

White to move


The fourth position will prove difficult to most players. It comes from an endgame study published in Chess Informant many years ago, and republished in Informant 101 as part of retrospective look at the career of Artur Jussupow. See "Latent Patterns" for a note on the spellings Yusupov/Jussupow.

White to move

Latent Patterns

Black to move



Objectively, Black's move here might not have been best. In the game's annotations, Artur Jussupow* presents an alternate manuever with prospects for lasting advantage. The text move presents White with difficulties, however, and Ivanchuk erred on the next move.

The position comes from the first rapid tiebreak game in the World Championship Candidates Quarterfinal in Brussels, 1991. This was game nine of the match between the young star Vassily Ivanchuk and Artur Jussupow in his prime. Jussupow won this game, and consequently the match. Jussupow then lost his match to Jan Timman, who lost in the final to Nigel Short. Short and Kasparov held their World Championship Match outside the authority of FIDE, leading to the split that was finally mended in Elista, 2007.

This game was selected by Chess Informant's readers as the best Golden Game. But, not every reader agreed. I found the game spectacular, but rejected it as one of the ten best because of tactical errors. Even so, I've been going through this game again and again through the past week, and I continue to marvel at Jussupow's sacrificial attack.

27...Re6 28.Qb7?

28.Qb5 might have led to the position I highlighted in "Convergences" last week.
28.Nce7! should have resulted in even chances for both players, according to Jussupow's annotations.

28...Rg6 29.Qxa8+ Kh7

White to move


Black has realized his ambitions of bringing forth the checkmate threats that were latent when he played 27...Re6. White's only defense is to sacrifice the queen to set up a knight fork that permits removal of the rook on g6.


The Pattern

The checkmate threat is a variant of a pattern that Jonathan Tisdall dubs "corner mate" in Improve Your Chess Now (1997). Tisdall presents this position with White to move.



1.Qh8+ Kxh8 2.Nf7#

Tisdall comments, "[a] fairly common picture, with no fixed name, and one of several mates that one might classify 'geographically,' perhaps as one of the family of corner mates" (200). Although this pattern would seem reasonably common, it is absent from the lists of checkmate patterns in Renaud and Kahn, The Art of the Checkmate (1953); Vukovic, The Art of Attack in Chess (1965); and Chandler, How to Beat Your Dad at Chess (1998).



*As with the names of many chess players the world over, Yusupov is spelled several ways. In the text here, I have used the spelling employed by Chess Informant, but in the tag I use Yusupov, which seems the more common spelling in the English speaking world. Yusupov is the spelling on the cover of The Petroff Defense (1999), for example, a book sitting in easy reach of my computer. FIDE uses the spelling Jussupow, as does ChessBase. Wikipedia employs Yusupov, as does Chessgames.com.