What's the best premium game service?

I've been thinking about joining one of the online premium game services, such as ICC or Chess24.com. But I only have the budget for one of them. Does anyone have an opinion on which one is best?

USATS Round 3

My round three game included a long grinding slog, followed by a brief tactical sequence that left me on top ... and culminated in ignominious defeat when I tried to exploit my advantage too quickly. There's not much to point out other than the point I went wrong.

Todd Durham, 1733

Bill Langford, 1650

Here I played 28...g5. I had just won White's h-pawn and I wanted to crack open the king-side before he had a chance to regroup for defensive operations. The problem is that I was the one that needed to regroup - winning the pawn had ruined the coordination of my rooks in particular. Furthermore, his pieces are ideally placed to attack if the position opens up. Dumbdumbdumb. Or as Connor likes to say, "Derp." My move isn't bad in and of itself, but it was the wrong plan, and once I realized things were going wrong I lost my resolve and did not find better defensive options.

I was very upset with myself after the game, and went for a short walk outside. It was a short walk as I wasn't dressed for it and didn't know the area. I could have walked five miles that night just to start calming down. C'est la vie.

The whole game below the fold.

Moscow Candidates 2016

Tomorrow and Monday the last two rounds of the Moscow Candidates Tournament will be played. Caruana and Karjakin are the co-leaders at the moment, with Anand a half-point back. Karjakin currently holds the tie-break edge, and he'll have White against Caruana in the last round.

Find your favorite site to view live games and tune in! (Mine is Chess24.com, but any of the big sites should provide good coverage.) Based on the last three rounds and the last few rounds in the 2013 Candidates Tournament, this should be fun!

USATS Round 2

Below is my second round game from the USATS. My first round game had been an utter disaster. I can't even say I played chess badly, as I just moved pieces around aimlessly and without thought. The only saving grace was that my opponent out-rated me by over 400 points, so the loss was easily the expected result.

But in round two I actually showed up and played with thought. Not always adequate thought, but thought nonetheless. I made two really bad moves in the game, and missed one good one, but otherwise I had a nice smooth win against a 1900+ player (who was only rated 1776 on the wall chart). My opponent had a good tournament result otherwise, including a win and a draw against a pair of 2100+ players.

Queen plus pawns versus Rook plus Bishop plus pawns, Part 2 [UPDATED]

Update is below the fold.

In the previous post I presented an endgame study. The solution is below the fold. First a digression on this type endgame. The original position was

It was White to play, though that's probably not critical for assessing the position. We thought this was probably a draw, as it looks like Black should be able to construct a fortress easily enough. But we decided to consult Garry's 2003 revised edition of Reuben Fine's Basic Chess Endings. The section "Queen vs. Rook and One Minor Piece" said the following:

Without Pawns the ending is a draw, though it is to be expected that there will be problem positions where one side or the other may win.

With Pawns, the Queen is equivalent to R+B+P. If the Pawns are even, the Queen will win (though not without difficulty); but R, B and two pawns are required to conquer the Q.

Where the pawns are even, the win is easier for the Q if they are not balanced. For then the superior side will be able to set up a passed Pawn and capture one of the opponent's pieces or tie him up so badly that some other part of the board will be defenseless.

He then follows it up with three examples, all of which have pawns on both sides of the board, or asymmetric pawns. Thus they were all useless for properly assessing our situation.

When I got home, I checked Muller & Lamprecht's Fundamental Chess Endings, but that book was silent on the issue, as were Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual and Paul Keres's Practical Chess Endings. Fine states that this is a win, and in 2003 Benko agreed with him. No one else says anything about it. (If anyone can consult Averbakh's endgame encyclopedia, or something from Informant, let me know.) So how to go about winning a position like the one above? I have no idea if the R+B side plays correctly. Feel free to give it a try, and add any research in the comment section below. Alternately, present it at the club. But this one is a bear.

I will also look in my database for similar positions, but not tonight as it's already passing 2am. Maybe Paul or Connor will do it for me!

Now for the solution to the study I gave in the previous post.

Queen plus pawns versus Rook plus Bishop plus pawns, Part 1

Garry and I played a few games tonight and the ending with Queen & three pawns versus Rook, Bishop & two pawns came up in a game. The Queen & pawns won easily enough. So we started looking at the ending withjust two pawns for the side with the Queen. We arrived at this position:

White to play

I thought I had a winning plan with 1 Qg8+ Ka7 2 Qc8. Was I correct that this was a winning line? If not, can White's play be improved?

I will give the answers in the following post.

Just another chess widow?

Amruta Mokal, among other things a chess photographer, is working at the Moscow Candidates tournament. On Monday Anish Giri battled Fabiano Caruana for over seven hours. So what did Giri's wife, Sopiko Guramishvili aka Chess24.com's Ms. Tactics, do?

@Sopiko20 What to do when your husband plays for seven hours! :) #dedicatedwife #MoscowCandidates pic.twitter.com/EOjww7Yt7h

— Amruta Mokal (@amrutamokal) March 22, 2016

Annotations for Giri-Caruana

Not by me! No sir, that game gives me a headache.

The Frenchman with two names, who is also known by three letters, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, has been annotating a Game of the Day for Chess.com's coverage of the Moscow Candidates Tournament. Yesterday he rightly chose to annotate Giri-Caruana. Apparently it took him several hours, and he admits parts that it still isn't all clear. Anyway, those notes can be found in this article, about halfway down the page. (I recommend downloading the .pgn file and looking at it in the program of your choice.) If you're a Grunfeld player, or expect to play against the Grunfeld, you might want to take a look at this in the currently trendy 3. f3 line.

Clermont Chess Club Blog, winning you prizes since about an hour ago!

Simon Williams, the Ginger GM, has started a new venture on Twitch TV. It's a live show with Simon and Fiona Steil-Antoni in which they banter, play against each other, play as a team against other players (a bit called Hand & Brain: one is the brain and calls out which piece to move, the other has to move it), talk about chess, post problems, and generally goof off. I believe it is a new thing that just started this week.

Around five this afternoon I looked in on it and they had posted a problem. The first person to give the answer would win one of Simon's DVDs. I don't have an account with Twitch TV so I couldn't give the answer, but the problem was familiar:

Storosenko

Zaitsev

USSR, 1970

White to play and win. 

It looked very familiar, and the reason for that was simple: I had blogged this problem back when I started the blog! It was the fifth real post I put up here. 

So ... IF you have been reading the blog back then, AND had remembered that problem, AND watched GingerGM on Twitch TV today, AND had a Twitch TV account, AND had been the fastest typist, you might have won something for your trouble! 

I don't think I can possibly come up with a better reason than that to read this blog.

Update

I've updated the Karjakin "simple problem" solution with some added explanation of the problem. That part is in the section marked "ADDED". I've also made a couple of small corrections to the text.

Bric-a-brac, 2016 March 21 edition

Nothing Ventured: Justin Horton, inspired by the recent Nakamura touch move controversy, discusses one of the problems with chess journalism.

The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis looks to be starting a new feature, Today in Chess. It appears it will be a daily broadcast on YouTube. The first one is two hours of commentary on Round 8 of the Candidates tournament. I haven't watched it yet, so I can't vouch for it. But if you've got a couple of hours to kill....

Meanwhile, Chess24.com has posted an interview with Anish Giri. I haven't read it yet as I'm saving it for later. But these pieces are usually pretty good, and Giri is very entertaining.

Finally, Lars Bo Hansen tweets the following:

Giri-Caruana at #MoscowCandidates is why I advice to study classical games if you want to improve. Modern games are often hard to learn from

— Lars Bo Hansen (@GMLars) March 21, 2016

When the game is finished I'll post it in a replayable window, so you'll understand what he means. Update: Here it is.

That said, the endgame of Anand-Aronian will probably be worth some time if you're into rook & pawn endgames. Both sides have two rooks currently, but somehow I'm reminded of Capablanca-Tartakower, New York, 1924. I'll see if it the comparison holds up, but what I'm thinking is that Anand will sacrifice pawns to aggressively post his king, as Capa did long ago. Update: Here's the Anand-Aronian game. It didn't go as I thought it might, but I particularly like Anand's last move. It's dead won after 66 Kxg7, but the text is just cleaner, and aesthetically better.

Endgame technique, this is wondrous strange!

I'll end tonight by mentioning a couple of recent firsts for me in endgame play.

As some of you know, Connor especially, I am not a fan of technical endgames. I find them boring, and thus I haven't learned nearly as much as I should have. For example, the Lucena and Philidor positions are outside of my knowledge base. I defend this ignorance first by stating that I am just a Class B scrounger, and second by mentioning that R+P vs R endgames have almost NEVER come up in serious games for me. In fact, I can only find one R+P vs R endgame in my database of tournament games, and in that case it lasted for one whole move before a draw was declared. Not only that, but it was a rook pawn anyway, so there are less things in my heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Lucena and Philidor's philosphies.

(That said, after discussing the matter with Connor, the [radio edit] R+P vs R ending came up twice in three games with him. But I think those may be the only two times the ending has even come up even in skittles games for me.)

Nevertheless, in the last week I've had two nice moments wherein I demonstrated actual technique. First I had a game in which I had a R+g-pawn vs a R+f-, g-, & h-pawns. I managed to bamboozle my opponent into exchanging g-pawns, and then held the draw with R vs R+f-and-h-pawns. It was pure book, baby!

And then the other night I managed to win a Queen vs Rook ending, no pawns on the board. Sure, I did catch my opponent with badly placed pieces, but hey, I won the thing!

Maybe there's something to this technique jive after all.

An editorial note

I'm running behind on my posts. Partly it is a problem of finding the time to write them up without distractions.

But there's also the problem of being able to write the posts with the level of quality I would like to achieve. I am just a Class B player, which means that I am a Class B analyst - unassisted. But like everyone else, I have access to an ELO 3200 beast to help me out. Thus I cyborg the analytical work.

But this means that my natural proclivities to look for positions that are complex, even weird, gets me into one briar patch after another. For example, while quickly cyborging my way through a recent club game between Connor & Theo, I went far afield of their actual game and ended up with the position featured in "A tactical mess". The initial position in that one features seven reasonable candidate moves (though I'm only going to look at six of them, I think), and the best line features four responses by Black that need to be considered, and White's has to look at four tries, minimum, to find the correct response to Black's best response. In fact, it might be a good candidate for the Stoyko Training Method.

Alexander Kotov, in Think Like a Grandmaster, calls such a "tree of analysis" a "Thicket of Variations":

Naturally, the greatest difficulties arise when a player has to contend with a position that is complicated and in which there are a lot of variations which every single move diverge into quite different lines of play. If one were to depict the tree in this case then in fact you would get a whole forest of variations, a real set of impenetrable thickets or jungle undergrowth. It is in just such positions that there is the greatest need for accuracy and discipline in one's thought, and that the analytical mastery of a player really shows itself.

For the cyborg analyst, the variations get calculated very accurately. What we've got here ISN'T failure to calculate! But we need to make sure what we've got here isn't failure to communicate, either.

So the questions the cyborg analyst has to ask himself are: "When do I stop?"; and "How do I present all this mess in a reasonable manner?"

And that's where I'm stuck. With the Connor-Theo inspired position I posted the other day, I've got pure madness, and lots of it. I've pretty much taken up residence in Bedlam. Putting all that together in a reasonable, digestible form may not be possible for a player/writer of my caliber, but I'm stuck having to try. So it's taking a while.

Similarly with my games from the USATS. In the first game I was going to post I found what to me seems a strange continuation. Unfortunately, I believe that it is also critical that I understand it. Sigh. I can't post it until I figure out that one position, and I can't do that until I can find quiet time when I have sufficient energy.

So that's why I'm stuck, and that's why the low output. The incredible complexity of the game even at my level is a killer.

...

Which gets me to one last point: Remember that any of you from the club are invited to post here! Either articles/items can be emailed to me to post here, or permission can be granted to post here directly without any interference from me. Just a thought....

Solution Time for "A problem courtesy of Sergey Karjakin"

Back at the end of February, I posted a problem Sergey Karjakin had tweeted:

White to play and win

Karjakin joked that this was a simple position. The first move is easy enough, at least!

How to win a dead drawn position when your opponent doesn't make any mistakes.

It's easy, you just run out the clock! From a Fischer Random contest a few nights ago, I give you the following. Mostly it's just a bad game by me, but after ending up deep in the soup, I put my head down and fought hard. I did actually have a win late, but my old nemesis (technical endgames) reared it's ugly head again. Finally, in a Rook + King versus Rook + King ending, I ran out his clock. There's something to be said for good time management; namely that it's better than bad time management.